mardi 26 avril 2022

An Angel Wing in Space

 






NASA - Hubble Space Telescope patch.


April 26, 2022


This Hubble Space Telescope image features two merging galaxies in the VV-689 system, nicknamed the Angel Wing. Unlike chance alignments of galaxies, which only appear to overlap when viewed from our vantage point on Earth, the two galaxies in VV-689 are in the midst of a collision. The galactic interaction has left the VV-689 system almost completely symmetrical, giving the impression of a vast set of galactic wings.

“Zoo Gems,” interesting galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project is a crowdsourced program and relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers to classify galaxies and help astronomers wade through a deluge of data from robotic telescopes. In the process, volunteers discovered a gallery of weird and wonderful galaxy types, some not previously studied. A similar, project called Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFAR is using the same crowdsourcing approach to locate supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

Hubble Space Telescope (HST)

For more information about Hubble, visit:

http://hubblesite.org/

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

http://www.spacetelescope.org/

Image, Animation Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt/Text Credits: ESA/NASA/Yvette Smith.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch