images

The Antennae galaxy in Corvus

by

Nasa/Stsci/Novapix

Reference

a-gax40-38001

Date

2006-09-11

At left, a ground-based telescopic view of the Antennae galaxies (known formally as NGC 4038/4039) - so named because a pair of long tails of luminous matter, formed by the gravitational tidal forces of their encounter, resembles an insect's antennae. The galaxies are located 45 million light-years away in the southern constellation Corvus. At right, the respective cores of the twin galaxies are the orange blobs, left and right of image center, crisscrossed by filaments of dark dust. A wide band of chaotic dust, called the overlap region, stretches between the cores of the two galaxies. The sweeping spiral- like patterns, traced by bright blue star clusters, shows the result of a firestorm of star birth activity which was triggered by the collision. This natural-color image is a composite of four separately filtered images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, on January 20, 1996.