The Antennae Galaxies started falling into each other some hundreds of millions of years ago . These days , the political party is still very much afoot , and here you could see what find when two galaxies slowly , violently become one .
The two galaxy actually get their name from a feature of speech of the collision – the tidal forces of the fusion have created long , aerial - like features that can be go out in wide - angle purview . locate some 62 million light - years away ( or 45 million light - years , depending on who you ask ) , the galaxies are in a state of perpetual , furious star production . The initial collision triggered the parentage of monolithic young stars , which have already long since detonate as supernovas .
That ’s left behind tons of building blocks for new star , which have accumulated in that mysterious red cloud of natural gas in the centre of the image . The hopeful points in the image are the gather matter slowly falling into black kettle of fish and neutron stars that are the oddment of the supernova . These are some seriously massive disgraceful pickle – some might be 100 times more massive than the Sun .
regrettably , we wo n’t get to see the final , merged Antennae Galaxy . Astronomers estimate it will take another 400 million years before they settled into a single elliptical galaxy . Click the ikon below for a secretive look at the full depiction , created from double by the Chandra X - irradiation Observatory , the Hubble Space Telescope , and the Spitzer Space Telescope .
[ Hubble ]
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