A jaw-dropping new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures what appears to be a strange galaxy with two ‘tails,’ but is actually the result of a pair of Milky Way-like spiral galaxies smashing together at high speeds.
NGC 2623 is in the late stages of the merging process, with the centers of the original galaxy pair now merged into one nucleus, but stretching out from the center are two tidal tails of young stars, a strong indicator that a merger has taken place. During such a collision, the dramatic exchange of mass and gases initiates star formation, seen here in both the tails. The prominent lower tail is richly populated with bright star clusters. These star clusters may have formed as part of a loop of stretched material associated with the northern tail, or they may have formed from debris falling back onto the nucleus. In addition to this active star-forming region, both galactic arms harbor very young stars in the early stages of their evolutionary journey. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
NGC 2623, also known as Arp 243, LEDA 24288 and UGC 4509, lies approximately 264 million light-years distant toward the constellation Cancer.
This object gained its unusual and distinctive shape as the result of a major collision and subsequent merger between two separate galaxies.
This violent encounter caused clouds of gas within the two galaxies to become compressed and stirred up, in turn triggering a sharp spike of star formation.
This active star formation is marked by speckled patches of bright blue; these can be seen clustered both in the center and along the trails of dust and gas forming NGC 2623’s sweeping curves (known as tidal tails).
These tails extend for roughly 50,000 light-years from end to end.
Many young, hot, newborn stars form in bright stellar clusters — at least 170 such clusters are known to exist within NGC 2623.
According to astronomers, NGC 2623 is in a late stage of merging.
It is thought that our Milky Way Galaxy will eventually resemble NGC 2623 when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy in about 4 billion years.
The newly released image of NGC 2623 was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments.
It is based on data obtained through six filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
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