Ones and Zeroes

NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI)

Our brains try to find order in the extra­or­di­nary images we see from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope and cre­ate pat­terns in the night sky. In this image of Arp 147, we see what looks like a one and a zero, or a ten.

Explore the image and tell us what kinds of sto­ries you see in this image. The left-most galaxy looks rel­a­tively untouched after blast­ing through the ring. It shows as just a smooth ring of starlight nearly edge-on to our line of sight here on Earth. But the galaxy to the right shows a bright, blue ring of new star for­ma­tion. Astronomers think that the com­pact galaxy passed through the galaxy on the right. That dis­tur­bance, like a peb­ble being thrown in a quiet pond, not only has blown out the cen­ter of the ring galaxy but also has trig­gered the burst of new star for­ma­tion. When the galaxy moved through, it com­pressed the gas at its edge, caus­ing a wave that moves moves out­ward to the galaxy’s edge. As this den­sity wave col­lided with calm gas and dust, the new stars formed.

When you look around the image, do you notice the red­dish knot in the lower left part of the blue ring galaxy? This is prob­a­bly the left­over nucleus of the galaxy that was hit.

Arp 147 lies about 400 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cetus the Whale. Hal­ton Arp com­piled his list of pecu­liar galax­ies in the 1960s.