Starry Ducky

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

Resem­bling a starry ducky, a pair of far­away galax­ies known as IRAS 21101+5810, merge together in a sky crowded with nearby stars from our own Milky Way.

Nearly every­where in the Uni­verse we turn NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, we see merg­ing galax­ies. Explore the bizarre nature of the tidal tail flung away from the lower galaxy. What shapes and sto­ries do you see in this image? Leave a com­ment below. Grav­ity inter­ac­tions from the merger have dis­torted the dust lanes of the galax­ies. A faint tidal tail also emerges from the upper galaxy. Look for the bright area of blue stars at the outer fringes of the lower galaxy. When galax­ies inter­act, gas and dust are pushed together. The gas and dust can col­lapse under its own grav­ity and new stars are formed. How­ever, exist­ing stars them­selves are not really dis­rupted by the merger. The two spi­ral galax­ies will prob­a­bly merge to form a sin­gle galaxy in the future. After sev­eral mil­lion years, the black holes at the cen­ter of these galax­ies will merge and the stars will set­tle into new orbits around a new galac­tic center.

IRAS 21101+5810 is found about 550 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Cepheus the King.

Comments

S 24-08-2010, 10:19

Starry Ducky, you’re the one,
You make Astron­omy lots of fun,
Starry Ducky I’m awfully fond of you…

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