Galaxy mergers are not only scientifically interesting, they're visually stunning, too. Modern telescopes are revealing more detail.
Arp 248 is also known as Wild’s Triplet, after astronomer Paul Wild , who studied the trio in the early 1950s. Image Credit: By Credit Line and Copyright Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona – http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/wilds.shtml, CC BY-SA 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20540032.” When dusty and gas-rich galaxies like Arp 248 merge, the merger frequently forms tails.
We now know these galaxies take such strange shapes because they’re interacting and potentially merging. Arp disagreed with that interpretation and said the unusual forms were due to ejections. But in any case, Arp realized astronomers weren’t very knowledgeable about how galaxies change over time, and he intended that astronomers could use his Atlas to study galaxy evolution.
Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. These images are from a series of 59 images of colliding galaxies released from archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers now think that about 25% of galaxies are currently merging with other galaxies. Even more of them are interacting gravitationally, if not merging, according to the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. Our Milky Way galaxy is evidence of this, as it cannibalized gas and even stars from the Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. And in several billions of years, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will merge.
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