The Encounter

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

A great encounter between a starry sea diver, at the top, and some­thing big­ger below is play­ing out in this image. That’s what I see. What sto­ries can you tell about this image?

UGC 8335 is an inter­act­ing pair of spi­ral galax­ies. The two galax­ies are swing­ing closer and closer together like ice skaters. Explore the image. Dark dust lanes dom­i­nate the cen­tral bulges of these galax­ies pro­vid­ing fuel for the for­ma­tion of new stars in the future. A bridge of stars, gas and dust links the two galax­ies. Grav­ity inter­ac­tions have thrown curved tails of gas and dust far out­side the galax­ies. These areas where the gas and dust get pressed together are star-making areas. Young, blue stars dom­i­nate these areas of the galax­ies. Look for many back­ground galax­ies in this view from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

In a bil­lion years or so, these galax­ies will com­plete their merger and become a larger ellip­ti­cal galaxy. UGC 8335 is located about 400 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Ursa Major, the Great Bear.