Monday 23 May 2022 11:00 AM
The Hubble image shows four dwarf galaxies merging into one, and an image from the Hubble Space Telescope shared by NASA this week shows an unusual interaction of four dwarf galaxies, according to a digitartlend report.
There are two small galaxies so close together that they look like one object, it’s called NGC 1741 and it’s located in the upper part of the image, then there is another cigar-shaped galaxy close to the right, and a fourth galaxy in the lower left connected to the other three by a stream of young stars.
The four galaxies together form a group called the Hickson Compact Group 31 or HCG 31. The group is located 166 million light-years from Earth, relatively close to seeing interacting dwarf galaxies.
The galaxies are currently so close to each other within 75,000 light-years of each other, that all four galaxies fit within the Milky Way.
This image is a revised version of an image originally released in 2010, which has been processed to highlight star-forming regions in the cluster. When gravitational forces from the mass of galaxies interact, this stimulates the formation of stars that glow blue when they are young.
Dwarf galaxy mergers are usually seen in very distant places, which means they are very old, but this group is relatively small, and astronomers were able to use data from Hubble to retrieve their locations and see when galaxies began interacting, a few hundred million years ago, and predict the time Which you will eventually integrate into.
The study’s lead author, Sarah Gallagher, said in a statement when the image was published: “This is a clear example of a group of galaxies on its way to merging because there is so much gas that it will mix everything up.
The galaxies are relatively small, comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and their velocities measured from previous studies show that they are moving very slowly relative to each other, only 134,000 miles per hour (60 kilometers per second). It is therefore difficult to imagine how this system will not end up becoming a single elliptical galaxy in another billion years.
Source: Technology: The Hubble Telescope captures an image of four dwarf galaxies merging into one..Details