Galaxies antennae | ||||
Galaxies antennae | Automatic translation | Updated June 01, 2013 | ||
There are about 100 million years, the two galaxies NGC 4038 and 4039 began to collide. This collision is still ongoing. NGC 4038 was a spiral galaxy, and NGC 4039, a barred spiral galaxy. They now form one of the most famous couples galaxy, called the Antennae. | Gravitational encounters between stars are very rare. Slow collisions of galaxies, carried out on tens of millions of years, but they are violent. The gravitational interactions of galaxies in collision, generate huge shock waves in the surrounding gas and dust. This shock wave causes the formation of massive stars in the millions. These massive stars have a short life that ends in explosion. These are supernovae that enrich the interstellar medium in heavy atoms (beyond iron). Image: Cosmic catastrophe in the form of galactic collision. There are about 100 million years, the two galaxies NGC 4038 and 4039 began to collide. | |||
Antennae seen by Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer | ||||
A new image of two colliding galaxies, NGC 4038 and 4039, was captured by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae Galaxies are represented here in a composite of three telescopes. Those of the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue colors), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold color) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red colors). The collision, which began over 100 million years ago triggered the ongoing training of millions of stars in the clouds of dust and gas of the galaxies. | Video: The bright point sources in the image are produced by matter falling into black holes and neutron stars, the remnants of massive stars. The Spitzer data show infrared light after clouds of dust heated by young stars located in the region of overlap between the two galaxies. The Hubble data show in red, old stars, brown dust filaments and yellow and white, star-forming regions. Objects whose brightness is lower in the optical image are clusters containing thousands of stars. |