The merger of galaxies is a spectacularly beautiful event. Recently, the famous NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, captured an impressive photo of two colliding galaxies, whose symmetrical shape gives the impression of seeing “galactic wings”. ,View header image, This fusion occurred in the system VV689, which was nicknamed “Angel Wing” in Spanish due to its unique formation and shape. You can download the image as wallpaper via “Hubble Inspects a Set of Galactic Wings”.
It is described on the official NASA|ESA Hubble website as “Unlike coincident alignments of galaxies, which appear to merely overlap from our perspective on Earth, the two galaxies in VV689 are in the midst of a collision.” Although we are very surprised by these types of events because they give us huge images, in reality collisions of galaxies are not strange, these interactions are currently taking place in many events in the universe.
In fact, our spiral galaxy, to which the Solar System and planet Earth belong, has suffered various collisions with smaller galaxies in the past leading up to its formation, and other mergers with neighboring galaxies are also expected in the future. Researchers are interested in these phenomena because studying the formation and interactions of galaxies reveals information about their evolution and may help explain the origin of the universe.
In fact, all large galaxies formed from individual collisions and interactions with smaller galaxies in events lasting billions of years, and this interaction gives them the particular formation patterns that we see. The interplay between these components of the universe is attributed to one of the most important forces in the universe that explains its formation, gravity, which reaches its maximum expression to allow the approach and subsequent collision of galaxies. Reaches.
Similarly, it is believed that galactic interactions have a very important relationship with the birth of stars as their collisions also lead to the formation of stars, although the estimation of their influence is still questioned.
Finally, the impressive image of colliding angel wings is part of the data set of “Galaxy Zoo” an astronomy project that aims to classify galaxies from robotic telescope data which has been reported as a “citizen science” phenomenon Because it requests the support of volunteers to explore the 100 billion galaxies recognized in the universe. With this, Galaxy Zoo describes that its intention is “to try to understand these processes and find out what galaxies can tell us about the past, present and future of the universe as a whole.”
NASA|ESA Hubble Report.
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