Waving Galaxies

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

To me, the top galaxy of this inter­act­ing pair seems to be wav­ing. MCG+12–02-001, the pair of galax­ies in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope are vis­i­bly affected as grav­ity pulls mate­r­ial and flings it in oppo­site direc­tions. When galax­ies pass close to each other; this hap­pens very often, gas and dust are pulled and pushed around like taffy. Stars don’t col­lide with each other, but the gas clouds can become so com­pressed that new stars form.

Explore the image. Can you find blue areas within the galax­ies? These are hot, new stars. Fol­low the spi­ral arms out, away from the galac­tic cen­ters. Hun­dreds of mil­lions of stars make up these galax­ies. Grav­ity even­tu­ally will draw these stars back toward the newly cre­ated galaxy set­tling back into new orbits.

While this galaxy col­li­sion caused two indi­vid­ual galax­ies to dis­ap­pear, a new larger galaxy is born and new stars with it. MCG+12–02-001 is located about 200 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Cas­siopeia, the Queen.