Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Galaxies Colliding, Stars Spinning Off
A lot of analogies are being made to fertility and birth from this story of the two galaxies colliding and stars spinning off. And this image does look rather like a fetus. This article from Space.com seems to explain the photo the best...
A cosmic clash between two galaxies yields a stunning look into the birth of billions of stars.
Known as the Antennae galaxies, these two merging objects have spent the last 500 million years fusing into one. This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is the sharpest ever of the galactic smash-up.
The Antennae are two spiral galaxies pinwheeling into one another, with the resulting collision spurring the formation of bright, compact stellar groups known as super star clusters. The collision itself is among the nearest to Earth, as well as the youngest example of crashing galaxies.
Almost half of the objects seen in the Antennae galaxies are young clusters with tens of thousands of individual stars. The orange blots to the left and right of this image’s center are the only reminders of the Antennae’s two galactic cores, and sport old stars swathed in filaments of dark dust.
The blue areas are active star-forming regions nestled within pink hydrogen gas....
Also from yahoo ->
Most of these clusters, created in the collision of the two galaxies, will disperse within 10 million years but about 100 of the largest will grow into "globular clusters" -- large groups of stars found in many galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
The Antennae galaxies, 68 million light years from Earth, began to fuse 500 million years ago.
A light year is the distance light waves travel in one year -- about 6 trillion miles.
The image serves as a preview for the Milky Way's likely collision with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, about 6 billion years from now.
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