Space Hubble Captures Swirling Galactic Trio

Space Hubble Captures Swirling Galactic Trio

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt

The Swirling Galactic Trio

The mass of dust and brilliant swirls of stars in this picture are the far-off galaxy merger IC 2431, which exists 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has recorded what seems a triple galaxy merger underway, along with a turbulent combination of star formation and tidal distortions brought on by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio.

A thick cloud of dust covers the center of this picture– through the light from a background galaxy is puncturing its outer extremities.

This picture is from a series of Hubble observations examining weird and remarkable galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.

Using Hubble’s powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers closely investigated a few of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers determined.

The original Galaxy Zoo project was the biggest galaxy census ever before performed and counted on crowdsourcing time from over 100,000 volunteers to categorize 900,000 unexamined galaxies.

The project achieved what would certainly have been years of work for a professional astronomer in just 175 days. This has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects.

Subsequent Galaxy Zoo projects have actually featured the biggest ever before studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, in addition to the discovery of completely brand-new kinds of compact star-forming galaxies.


Read the original article on PHYS.

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