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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a pair of colliding galaxies as their massive, bright ring of stars has been distorted by the intense gravitational forces between them.
The tangled galaxies, known as Arp-Madore 417-391, are located about 670 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
The new image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), specifically designed to search for galaxies in the early universe, and released on November 21 by the European Space Agency (ESA).
“The two galaxies were gravitationally distorted and wrapped up in a huge ring, leaving the nuclei of the two galaxies side by side,” European Space Agency officials said. Writing on the Internet (Opens in a new tab).
Related: Incredibly perfect ‘Einstein Ring’ captured by the James Webb Space Telescope
The cosmic collision is the latest in the Arp-Madore catalog of Weird Southern Galaxies and Associations, an archive of more than 6,000 images of unusual galaxies spotted in the southern sky.
In June 2019, Hubble detected another galaxy merger, known as Arp-Madore 2026-424, which produced a similar but imperfect ring structure. It looked like the face of a ghost.
Ring structures in galaxy mergers are extremely rare, forming only when two colliding galaxies collide head-on rather than being slowly pulled together by gravity. According to NASA (Opens in a new tab).
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The rings are only temporary and last about 100 million years. Then, the stars are gradually withdrawn into the parent galaxies, which eventually merge into a new galaxy after between 1 billion and 2 billion years, according to NASA.
There are about 100 known galaxy merger rings, but very few are as perfect a circle as the freshly snapped Arp-Madore 417-391. The symmetrical shape of the new ring is likely due to the fact that the colliding galaxies were roughly the same size, which is indicated by the nearly identical size and brightness of the two galactic centers in the image. However, the exact mechanisms of ring formation are still unknown.
Arp-Madore 417-391 is flagged as a potential future target for James Webb Space Telescope Pictured, according to the European Space Agency. So, we might not have to wait long to find out more about this lovely cosmic record.
