In new images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to celebrate its fourth science anniversary, a familiar galaxy transforms into something far richer, and far more complex, than ever seen before. Webb’s unprecedented sensitivity across near- and mid-infrared wavelengths cuts through the thick lanes of dust that obscure Centaurus A’s center in visible light, showing […]
Category: Interacting Galaxies
Apocalypse When? Hubble Casts Doubt on Certainty of Galactic Collision
As far back as 1912, astronomers realized that the Andromeda galaxy — then thought to be only a nebula — was headed our way. A century later, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to measure the sideways motion of Andromeda and found it was so negligible that an eventual head-on collision with the […]
Hubble Jams With A Cosmic Guitar
Arp 105 is a dazzling ongoing merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy drawn together by gravity, characterized by a long, drawn out tidal tail of stars and gas more than 362,000 light-years long. The immense tail, which extends beyond this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, was pulled from the two galaxies […]