Interactions Between These Two Galaxies Is Creating a Tsunami of Starbirth
If you like looking at weirdly shaped galaxies, there's no better place than the "Arp Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies."
Compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966, the catalogue is a compendium of 338 oddball interacting galaxies. But Arp didn't compile the catalogue just to show off galaxies that look strange. He thought these peculiar galaxies were excellent laboratories to study the physical processes that distort normal-looking elliptical and spiral galaxies. He was one of the first to suggest galactic encounters could form stars in bursts.
His view contrasted with those of many astronomers during the 1960s, who wrote off misshapen galaxies as mere oddities. They believed in a "cookie-cutter" universe, that most galaxies were orderly and symmetrical. But Arp believed in a different kind of universe, one filled with violence and birth.
One such Arp galaxy that is exploding with new stars is in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Arp 143 system. The two galaxies in this system collided head-on, fueling the triangular-shaped burst of star formation. The pair contains the distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445 at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444 at left.
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