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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a pair of colliding galaxies as their massive, glowing ring of stars has been distorted by the intense gravitational forces between them.
The tangled galaxies, known as Arp-Madore 417-391, lie about 670 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Eridanus, visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
The new image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which is 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 in a massive ring, leaving the nuclei of the two galaxies side by side,” said officials at the European Space Agency. 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 strange 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 a ghost’s face.
Ring structures in galaxy mergers are extremely rare and only form 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 pulled back into the parent galaxies, which eventually merge into one 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 broken Arp-Madore 417-391. The new ring’s symmetrical shape 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 galaxy 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 may not have to wait long to find out more about this delicious cosmic disk.