Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                               2020 December 3

                     The Antennae Galaxies in Collision
                        Image Credit: ESA/Hubble NASA

   Explanation: Sixty million light-years away toward the southerly
   constellation Corvus, these two large galaxies are colliding. The
   cosmic train wreck captured in stunning detail in this Hubble Space
   Telescope snapshot takes hundreds of millions of years to play out.
   Cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the galaxies' individual stars
   don't often collide though. Their large clouds of molecular gas and
   dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center
   of the wreckage. New star clusters and interstellar matter are jumbled
   and flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational forces.
   This Hubble close-up frame is about 50,000 light-years across at the
   estimated distance of the colliding galaxies. In wider-field views
   their suggestive visual appearance, with extended structures arcing for
   hundreds of thousands of light-years, gives the galaxy pair its popular
   name, The Antennae Galaxies.

                     Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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                             & Michigan Tech. U.

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