Five galaxies that appear to be orbiting each other: here’s the Hickson Compact Group 40 captured by Hubble. One billion years from now, they will collide into one giant elliptical galaxy.
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This is another year spent scanning the air for Hubble Space Telescopewhich becomes 32. For the occasion, NASA reveal photos Hickson Compact Group 40 also called HCG40, a strange grouping of five galaxy. Among them, the galaxy called elongated round shape and lenticular galaxy. The other three are spiral in shape, like Milky Way.
Located after the constellationular nagathis group is so compact that it would fit in an area of space less than twice the diameter of our stellar disk Milky Way. Reason? That black material : surrounds the five galaxies in a kind of halo. As a result, they approach each other relentlessly, bored by their mutual gravitational attraction, but also by black material, invisible. Hubble watched them at key moments in their lives as they prepared for combine with each other. It’s just that the time scale is not the same as ours, because merging will only occur in a billion years!
It was James-Webb’s turn to take over
Hubble, deployed in orbit around the Earth in 1990 by NASA astronauts, made more than 1.5 million observations of some 50,000 celestial bodies! Enough to make a great discovery, like thataccelerated expansion of the universe, or specify its size and age. Today, James Webb is preparing to take over as it continues to calibrate and prepare all its gauges. Like its predecessors, it will explore the deep Universe, with all its goals, studying the first moments and the formation of galaxies. They can also be in the same state as galaxy HGC40, that is, gathered in a compact, dense cluster.
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