Warped Arms and Scorpion Tails

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

Like a scor­pion with its tail stretched and twisted high above its head, galaxy NGC 2146 glit­ters in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the red neb­u­lae and wide-flung stars in the long tail in this image? What sto­ries or shapes do you see? Leave a note below.

When galax­ies inter­act, the colos­sal forces of grav­ity stretch and twist the gas and dust of the galac­tic arms. Stars are shifted in their orbits and whole strands of them can be flung into deep space. What we end up with is a dis­torted and warped galaxy. Astronomers clas­sify NGC 2146 as a barred spi­ral because of its shape. The two most strik­ing fea­tures are the long tail high over­head and the dark dust of a spi­ral arm that pulls in front of the galaxy.

NGC 2146 is also known as a star­burst galaxy. As galax­ies inter­act, gas and dust are smashed, pushed and pulled by the galac­tic forces. This com­pres­sion of hydrogen-rich neb­u­lae trig­gers star birth.

NGC 2146, dis­cov­ered by Ger­man astronomer Friedrich Win­necke in 1876, is slightly smaller than our own Milky Way Galaxy. It mea­sures about 80,000 light-years across. It lies about 70 mil­lion light-years away from Earth toward the faint con­stel­la­tion of Camelopardalis, the Giraffe.