From the Hubble Space Telescope
This Hubble Space Telescope image provides a detailed look at a brilliant "fireworks show" at the center of a collision between two galaxies, the Antennae galaxies ( 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 63 million light-years away in the southern constellation Corvus. Hubble has uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result of the head-on wreck. This natural-color image is a composite of four separately filtered images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
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 resolution is 15 light-years
Image Title: The Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038/4039
based on press release for PHOTO NO.: STScI-PRC97-34a
Credit: Brad Whitmore (STScI), and NASA
Last Modified On: Tuesday, December 19, 2000