Hubble Space Telescope Snaps Dazzling View of Two Colliding Galaxies - Geek

A new Hubble Space Telescope image captured two colliding galaxies, and it was a dazzling solar system sight.

The image, which showed a location roughly 230 million light-years away from Earth, takes place in the constellation Hercules. In the image, the Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on NGC 6052, a pair of extremely bright, colliding galaxies, according to an ESA/NASA press release. The NGC 6052 image was taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

#HubbleFriday Long ago gravity drew these 2 galaxies together. However, actual collisions between stars are very rare as stars are very small relative to the distances between them. Eventually the galaxies will fully merge to form a single, stable galaxy: https://t.co/PwHvlSoEW1 pic.twitter.com/5PUcXp7BCL

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) March 8, 2019

In 1784, William Herschel first discovered the NGC 6052 galaxies, which was originally thought to be a single irregular galaxy due to their strange shape. Now, we know that the shape is uncanny because it’s actually two galaxies merging together.

Many years ago, gravity brought the two galaxies together to form NGC 6052. Stars from NGC 6052’s original galaxies follow new trajectories and undergo new gravitational effects. Despite these changes, star collisions don’t occur often, since stars are very tiny compared to the distances between them and the galaxies’ empty spaces. The galaxies, which are in the process of colliding, will eventually come together to form a single galaxy.

NGC 6052 is studied by scientists to get an idea of what future galaxy mergers will look like, Space.com noted. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, will have a similar collision with the Andromeda galaxy, a nearby galaxy, many years from now. But, this isn’t expected to occur for approximately four billion years.

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