Diffuse Butterfly

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

A faint and dif­fuse but­ter­fly shape sur­rounds this image of an ellip­ti­cal galaxy from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

Explore this swirl of stars. Leave a note in the com­ments below telling us what shapes and sto­ries you see.

A long time ago, two spi­ral galax­ies encoun­tered each other far away. Astronomers call this new ellip­ti­cal galaxy SDSS J162702.56+432833.9. Although dis­tances are great in the Uni­verse and galax­ies are spread apart, galac­tic merg­ers seem to be a fre­quent occur­rence. Grav­ity draws galax­ies together. As they come closer, stars, dust and gas are pushed and pulled. The galax­ies are stretched and dis­torted. The spi­ral arms are bent. Some spi­ral arms loop away from their galax­ies in long tails. No stars col­lide but gas and dust smash together. Often the result is a burst of new star for­ma­tion. If you look close at the image you can see bluish clouds of stars. These are hot new stars. We can also see many red­der areas. These are regions of older stars that are bil­lions of years old. The the bright galac­tic core, look for lanes of dust block­ing out the starlight. These and the loops of faint stars far away from the galaxy may be all that is left of the spi­ral arms of the orig­i­nal galax­ies. Scat­tered through­out the image, look for dozens of far-off galax­ies. Some of the galax­ies shine through the haze of the closer ellip­ti­cal galaxy.

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