Image via NASA/ESA.
To celebrate Halloween, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope released this new image, that captures two galaxies of equal size in a collision that appears to resemble a ghostly face. This observation was made on June 19, 2019.
According to a statement from Hubble:
Although galaxy collisions are common — especially in the early universe — most are not head-on impacts like the collision that likely created this Arp-Madore system 704 million light-years from Earth. This violent encounter gives the system an arresting ring structure, but only for a short amount of time. The crash has pulled and stretched the galaxies’ discs of gas, dust, and stars outward, forming the ring of intense star formation that shapes the “nose” and “face” features of the system.
Ring galaxies are rare, and only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood. The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation so that they interact to create the ring, and before long they will have merged completely, hiding their messy past.
The side-by-side juxtaposition of the two central bulges of stars from the galaxies that we see here is also unusual. Since the bulges that form the “eyes” appear to be the same size, we can be sure that the two galaxies involved in the crash were of equal size. This is different from the more common collisions in which small galaxies are gobbled up by their larger neighbors.
Bottom line: Spooky cosmic face image for Halloween 2019 from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Source:
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/hubble-spooky-cosmic-face-image