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> The Antennae galaxies
The Antennae galaxies
author: Nasa/ESA/Novapix
reference: a-gax40-38006
Image Size 300 DPI: 33 * 33 cm
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest (about 45 million light years away)and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink. Image taken with the Hubble space telescope.
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