HD: Picture & Film: Trio of Galaxies Mix It Up

Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date. At first glance, it looks as if a smaller galaxy has been caught in a tug-of-war between a Sumo-wrestler pair of elliptical galaxies. The hapless, mangled galaxy may have once looked more like our Milky Way, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy. But now that it's caught in a cosmic Cuisinart, its dust lanes are being stretched and warped by the tug of gravity. Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars. It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies. This will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation. If there are astronomers on any planets in this galaxy group, they will have a ringside seat to seeing a flurry of starbirth unfolding over many millions of years to come. Eventually the ellipticals should merge too, creating one single super-galaxy many times larger than our Milky Way. This trio is part of a tight cluster of 16 galaxies, many of them being dwarf galaxies. The galaxy cluster is called the Hickson Compact Group 90 and lies about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish. About the Object Object Name: Hickson Compact Group 90 (HCG 90), M59 Object Description: Cluster of Interacting Galaxies Position (J2000): R.A. 22h 02m 05s.62 Dec. -31° 58' 00".44 Constellation: Pisces Austrinus Distance: 106 million light-years (33 megaparsecs) Dimensions: This image is roughly 3.2 arcminutes (1,000,000 light-years or 31,000 parsecs) wide. About the Data Science Team: This image was created from HST data from proposal 10554: ________________________R. Sharples (University of Durham), M. Beasley (University ________________________of California, Santa Cruz), J. Blakeslee (Dominion ________________________Astrophysical Observatory), S. Zepf and A. Kundu (Michigan ________________________State University), and J. Cho (University of Durham). Instrument: ACS/WFC Exposure Date(s): May 16, 2006 Exposure Time: 1.2 hours Filters: F475W (g) and F850LP (z) About the Release Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Sharples (University of Durham) Release Date: March 3, 2009 Color The image is a composite of separate exposures made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Two filters were used to sample broad wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are: F850LP (z) red F475W (g)+F850LP (z) green F475W (g) blue ___________________________________________________________________________________ please leave a comment if you want, this is just to show what is out there... And before you go and spam, dl it watch it and make up your own mind... cheers the_phyrexian Are you a British citizen? Click here! (Petition to stop Sharia Law) http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/shariastop there is a reseed section, read it / use it... http://suprbay.org/forumdisplay.php?f=35 or visit my blog... http://thephyrexian.tk

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