(ORDO NEWS) — The Hubble Space Telescope has been studying the Universe for 32 years. During this time, he took a lot of great photos, but it’s too early for him to retire and he continues to prove it.
He recently took a remarkable picture of the merger of three galaxies at a distance of 681 million light-years from Earth.
The merger of such huge accumulations of matter sometimes leads to the emergence of new stars. The observed cluster, codenamed IC 2431, is located in the constellation Cancer, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
More about photo
The picture shows how gravity literally tears galaxies apart. Although the process of merging is taking place, it is not worth talking about the massive destruction of the celestial bodies themselves, since in fact they are located quite far from each other.
In some materials, NASA mentions grains of sand for comparison, each of which is located at the distance of a football field from each other. When the merger is completed, a new star cluster will be formed, probably elliptical in shape.
At the same time, it will not do without visible interactions on a galactic scale – thick clouds in the center of the image are gas and dust accumulations, from which, quite possibly, new stars will form.
According to the ESA, the images belong to the Galaxy Zoo science project, in which scientists explore “weird and wonderful” galaxies among those captured by the Hubble telescope.
According to the agency, over 100,000 volunteers put in the effort to classify the 900,000 images. The ESA claims that in 175 days, the project achieved results that professional astronomers would have taken years to achieve.
Scientists are given these observations
- The results of observations will help to understand a lot about the past and future of the Milky Way.
- It is believed that over the past 12 billion years it has swallowed up more than a dozen galaxies.
- It is expected that in 4.5 billion years our galaxy will have a “collision” with the Andromeda Nebula. This will completely change the pattern of the starry sky above the Earth, but the solar system itself (if it still exists) will probably not be affected.
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