Colliding Galaxies (2) ...
The following Hubble Space Telescope image shows two colliding galaxies known as the "Antennae Galaxies"
because of their peculiar shape.
The two galaxies are 63 million light
years away, in the constellation Corvus.
The long tails are thought to be caused by tidal distortion following the
collision of two galaxies. The right portion of the image shows a blowup of the region outlined in green
in the left portion of the image. At least a thousand bright young star clusters can be found in the
image, the result of vigorous star formation triggered by the collision. The cores of the two colliding
galaxies are the two orange blobs.
The top right
animation shows a supercomputer simulation of the collision of the two galaxies that
formed the Antennae Galaxies.
