We think that there is no one who is speechless in the face of the fascinating sights of the vast and endless universe that exists outside our planet. Whether it’s a photo of a galaxy, a star or a black hole; Images from outer space have always managed to impress us humans and have made us question what our place is in this huge universe.
Now a new one has been added to these images. The newly shared image, which shows the moments when two galaxies interact with each other, once again showed us what great events are happening outside of our little planet, even if we don’t realize it.
The ‘dance of the galaxies’ 60 million light-years from Earth
Extremely crazy things happen when giant galaxies interact and merge. The two galaxies you see above appear to be locked together in a ‘cosmic dance’ that has been going on for less than half a billion years.
Galaxies with each spin occurring on this intergalactic dance floor; they permanently replace each other. When the dance is complete, these two galaxies merge to form a single giant galaxy.
In the image captured by the 4-meter Blanco Telescope in Chile, the larger one that seems to dissolve slowly is the NGC 1512 galaxy, while the smaller one is a dwarf lenticular galaxy named NGC 1510. These two galaxies, located in the direction of the Horologium constellation, are approximately 60 million light-years away from us.
So what happens when two galaxies merge?
Galaxies are located quite far from each other in space; however, they gradually interact with each other throughout cosmic time. The change and development of galaxies takes place thanks to these interactions. In fact, the Milky Way galaxy in which Earth is located also interacts with other galaxies. Even now, it can be said that our galaxy has swallowed some dwarf galaxies and added the stars in these galaxies to its population.
The imaged interaction of NGS 1510 and NGC 1512 is also a good example of what happened in this process. The gravitational attraction of the two galaxies to each other during this interaction spurred large waves of star formation, particularly in the outer spiral arms of the larger galaxy. As a result, the event called ‘star bursts’ by astronomers took place, and long, blue strings of hot, young stars formed here jumped into space.
This image is actually a small part of a larger study on dark matter
This galactic dance scene is captured by the Dark Energy Camera ( ) developed as part of Dark Energy Research. It was obtained as part of a larger image taken by the Blanco Telescope equipped with the DECam). The main purpose of the research in question is to obtain more information about dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Within 6 years of research, DECam was able to collect data on approximately 300 million galaxies across 5,000 square degrees of southern sky. This image showing the interaction of galaxies is one of the detailed images obtained in the research. In fact, if you take a closer look at the image, you can see even more distant galaxies forming the background of the two interacting galaxies.
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