Hubble captures image of three galaxies merging 681 million light years away
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the galaxy merger IC 2431, which is happening over 618 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Cancer, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The image captures a mixture of star formation and tidal dortions that are caused the gravitational interactions of these three galaxies.
Even though the galaxies are merging with each other, there will be very few instances of celestial bodies crashing since they are spaced so far apart. In some of its educational material, NASA uses the metaphor of grains of sand separated the length of football fields to help understand the massive scale of the dance between celestial bodies. When galaxies combine, they lose their own shape to form a new, usually elliptical shape.
But the thick cloud of dust that obscures the centre of the image indicates another phenomenon that happens when galaxies merge: the clouds of gas and dust that are part of galaxies collide into each other, sometimes resulting in the formation of new stars.
According to ESA, this image is part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project that investigates “weird and wonderful” galaxies from Hubble observations.
It crowdsourced time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. ESA claims that the project has achieved in 175 days what would have taken years if done a professional astronomer.
