Spinning Lights

Credit: NASA & ESA

We need some bright lights for the hol­i­days. The col­ors in this image of the Cart­wheel Galaxy fits perfectly.

This image com­bines data from four dif­fer­ent orbit­ing obser­va­to­ries; the Chan­dra X-ray Obser­va­tory, in pur­ple, the Galaxy Evo­lu­tion Explorer satel­lite, in blue, the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, in green, and the Spitzer Space Tele­scope, in red. Astronomers use dif­fer­ent satel­lites to see in dif­fer­ent kinds of light. Spitzer’s tele­scope helps us see objects that are warm while Chan­dra and GALEX help us see areas with high energy, like black holes and exploded stars.

The Cart­wheel Galaxy’s odd shape prob­a­bly comes from a col­li­sion with one of its smaller neigh­bors mil­lions of years ago. The smaller galaxy’s inter­ac­tion caused the gas in the main galaxy to squeeze together, or com­press, as it plunged through the larger galaxy. This sparked a wave of new star for­ma­tion, cre­at­ing mil­lions of new stars. Some of these stars became super mas­sive, explod­ing as super­novas. We can see their rem­nants in the image as bright white spots along the outer rim of the galaxy.

The Cart­wheel Galaxy is slightly larger than our Milky Way. It lies about 400 mil­lion light years away toward the faint south­ern con­stel­la­tion of Sculp­tor.