Galaxies Collide in New Images Released for Hubble's 18th Birthday
By Alexis Madrigal
NASA has released 59 new high-resolution images of galaxies colliding across the universe to mark the Hubble Space Telescope's 18th birthday.
Many of the galaxies were first compiled by Halton Arp in the mid-'60s book, The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which cataloged misshapen galaxies glimpsed by the ground-based telescopes of the day.
With the Hubble's sensitive cameras and tools, the shapes of these peculiar galaxies have been revealed as the product of gravitational interactions between the huge clusters of stars. As gravity pulls the galaxies together, the tidal forces at work warp the standard galactic spirals and ellipses into temporarily strange shapes.
Left: Arp 148 consists of a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The ring was created by a shockwave that resulted from the galaxies colliding. Located in the Ursa Major constellation about 500 million light-years away, Arp 148 is thought to provide a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision.
Photo: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech)
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