Hubble Captures Galaxies' Ghostly Gaze
Release date: Oct 28, 2019 10:00 AM (EDT)
The universe is a bubbling cauldron of matter and energy that have mixed together over billions of years to create a witches' brew of birth and destruction.
Firestorms of star birth sweeping across the heavens. Dying stars rattling the very fabric of space in titanic explosions. Death Star-like beams of energy blasting out of overfed black holes at nearly the speed of light. Large galaxies devouring smaller companions, like cosmic Pac-Men. Colossal collisions between galaxies flinging stars around like breaking pool balls. Hubble has seen them all.
This compulsive mayhem in space can produce weird-looking shapes that resemble creepy creatures seemingly conjured up in stories of the paranormal. Among them is the object in this new Hubble image.
The snapshot reveals what looks like an uncanny pair of glowing eyes glaring menacingly in our direction. The piercing "eyes" are the most prominent feature of what resembles the face of an otherworldly creature. This frightening object is actually the result of a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies.
Each "eye" is the bright core of a galaxy, the result of one galaxy slamming into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.
The system is catalogued as Arp-Madore 2026-424, from the Arp-Madore "Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations."
Although galaxy collisions are common—especially back in the young universe—most of them are not head-on smashups, like the collision that likely created this Arp-Madore system. The violent encounter gives the system an arresting "ring" structure for only a short amount of time, about 100 million years. The two galaxies will merge completely in about 1 to 2 billion years, hiding their messy past.
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Find the entire Hubble News archive, images, and videos at HubbleSite.org.
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