Curling C

NASA, ESA, the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Col­lab­o­ra­tion, and A. Evans (Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

Galaxy inter­ac­tions cre­ate all sorts of curls and odd shapes. In this NASA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image of UGC 4881, the let­ter ‘C’ spi­rals out in deep space.

Or maybe you see a grasshop­per as astronomers saw while gaz­ing through earth-bound tele­scopes. UGC 4881, also known as “The Grasshop­per,” is a dra­matic view of two merg­ing galax­ies from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

Explore the image. Dozens of other back­ground galax­ies can be seen. Zoom in on the cen­ter of UGC 4881. The cores of the par­ent galax­ies are dis­tinct but are clearly over­lap­ping. Astronomers believe these galax­ies are halfway through their merger. Zoom out and fol­low the tail as it spi­rals out into space. The curly tail glows blue with the light of star clus­ters full of hot, young stars. The flurry of star for­ma­tion is a result of the inter­ac­tions between the galax­ies. Streams of gas and dust are stretched and pushed together. Some areas of gas and dust come together to form stars. Astronomers noticed a super­nova explo­sion in this galaxy in 1999. Super­novae occur in young stars with mass 10 to 50 times larger than our Sun. These stars are short-lived and burn through their hydro­gen and helium fuel at very high-rates. Even­tu­ally, when they can no longer sus­tain nuclear reac­tions in their cores, they col­lapse on them­selves and rebound in spec­tac­u­lar explo­sions. The light from a super­nova can eas­ily out­shine an entire galaxy for a short time. Heav­ier ele­ments such as gold and sil­ver are created.

Galac­tic merg­ers are sur­pris­ingly com­mon even when dis­tances between galax­ies are very great. Grav­ity brings the galax­ies together in a dance that lasts bil­lions of years. The ulti­mate result of the col­li­sion is the for­ma­tion of a larger, ellip­ti­cal galaxy.

UGC 4881 lies about 500 mil­lion miles away toward the faint con­stel­la­tion Lynx. The galaxy is also the 55th galaxy in Arp’s Atlas of Pecu­liar Galax­ies.