NASA’s Photo of the Day, featuring colorful stars in its background, shows the merging of two galaxies.
According to RCO News Agency, Stars are scattered throughout the Milky Way, but the two eye-catching galaxies featured in NASA’s photo of the day lie far beyond the Milky Way, more than 300 million light-years from Earth. The twisted and distorted appearance of the galaxies is due to mutual gravitational tides that occur as a result of the close collision of the two galaxies.
According to NASA, Cataloged as ‘Arp 273’ or ‘UGC 1810’, these galaxies seem strange, but we now know that interacting galaxies are a common phenomenon in the universe.
For example, the large spiral galaxy “Andromeda” is about two million light-years away from us and is inevitably approaching the Milky Way. The two strange galaxies in this photo may provide a similar example of an Andromeda-Milky Way encounter in the distant future.
Frequent collisions of galaxies in the cosmic time scale eventually lead to their merging into a galaxy consisting of stars.
From the point of view of NASA scientists, the bright cores of these two galaxies are separated by only a little more than 100,000 light years.
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