Starfish Arm Wrestling

Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Col­lab­o­ra­tion, and K. Noll (STScI)

These galax­ies seem to me like starfish arm wrestling or toss­ing a ball. NGC 6050 and IC 1179 offer a stun­ning exam­ple of merg­ing spi­ral galax­ies in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

Explore the image. What do you see in the spi­ral galax­ies linked together by their swirling arms? Waves and spokes of new star for­ma­tion make up the outer spi­ral arms of IC 1179 on the right. Huge star clus­ters made up of hot, young blue-giant stars light up clouds of gas and dust through­out both galax­ies. In a bil­lion years or so, the galax­ies will merge com­pletely into a sin­gle, large ellip­ti­cal galaxy.

Also known as Arp 272, this merg­ing galaxy is part of the Her­cules Galaxy Clus­ter. This galaxy clus­ter is part of the Great Wall of galaxy clus­ters and super­clus­ters; the largest known struc­ture in the uni­verse. Arp 272, num­ber 272 in Arp’s Atlas of Pecu­liar Galax­ies, is found about 450 mil­lion light-years away from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Her­cules. The light we see from Arp 272 today left nearly a half-billion years ago as ani­mals were just begin­ning to live on land on Earth dur­ing the Sil­urian Period.