Life at the Intersection of Colliding Galaxies

This false-color image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals hidden populations of newborn stars at the heart of the colliding "Antennae" galaxies. These two galaxies, known individually as NGC 4038 and 4039, are located around 68 million light-years away and have been merging together for about the last 800 million years. The latest Spitzer observations provide a snapshot of the tremendous burst of star formation triggered in the process of this collision, particularly at the site where the two galaxies overlap. The image was taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera and is a combination of infrared light ranging from 3.6 microns (shown in blue) to 8.0 microns (shown in red). The dust emission (red) is by far the strongest feature in this image. Starlight was systematically subtracted from the longer wavelength data (red) to enhance dust features. The two nuclei, or centers, of the merging galaxies show up as white areas, one above the other. The brightest clouds of forming stars lie in the overlap region between and left of the nuclei. Throughout the sky, astronomers have identified many of these so-called "interacting" galaxies, whose spiral discs have been stretched and di

Date

2004-09-07

Photographer / author

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Collection

JPL

Archive

NASA Image and Video Library

Type

photograph

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