NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life in a brief, intense, brilliant “fireworks show” at the heart of a pair of colliding galaxies.
“The sheer number of these young star clusters is amazing,” says Brad Whitmore of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). “The discovery will help us put together a chronological sequence of how colliding galaxies evolve. This will help us address one of the fundamental questions in astronomy: why some galaxies are spirals while others are elliptical in shape.”
“These spectacular images are helping us understand how globular star clusters formed from giant hydrogen clouds in space,” adds Francois Schweizer of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “This galaxy is an excellent laboratory for studying the formation of stars and star clusters since it is the nearest and youngest example of a pair of colliding galaxies.”
Earlier Hubble pictures show that nearly a third of very distant galaxies, which existed early in the history of the universe, appear to be interacting galaxies, like the Antennae. In particular, the Hubble Deep Field (a “long-exposure” image from Hubble looking at galaxies far back into time), uncovered a plethora of odd-shaped, disrupted-looking galaxies. They offer direct visual evidence that galaxy collisions were more the rule than the exception in the early days of the universe.
In addition to providing a window into how stars and galaxies formed in the dim past, the Hubble views might also offer a glimpse of the future fate of Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way, when it either sideswipes or plows head-on into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy billions of years from now.
Phew! Not much I can say about all that. Anyone see an image of an old man with a white beard using a front-end loader to move this stuff around?
The interesting thing is that when we look into the sky, we’re looking into the past. That scene is tens of thousands of years old. Did you ever read the “Slow Glass” series of sci-fi short stories?
Science freaking rocks!
We once calculated, over at Bad Astronomy, that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches of the world combined. Ever pick up just a handful of sand?
And to think all that – including what makes up you and I – is supposed to have simultaneously originated in a space smaller than the head of a pin. Hey, move over! Stay on your side of the universe!
RBG
I’m glad this story is from 1997. If it were yesterday, it might confirm the “COSMIC TRIGGER EVENT” that was supposed to have happened yesterday.
And then, of course, there’s that joke you’ve probably heard, touted as “the world’s funniest”:
Detective Sherlock Holmes and his gruff assistant Doctor Watson pitch their tent while on a camping expedition, but in the middle of the night Holmes nudges Watson awake and questions him.
HOLMES: Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.
WATSON: I see millions of stars, and if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it is quite likely there are some planets like earth, and if there are a few planets like earth out there there might also be life.
HOLMES: Watson, you idiot! Somebody stole our tent.
beautiful!
It’s hard to imagine the energy being expended by such a collision.
Cripes, Alix. You’re too young to have read about “slow glass”. I still think about that every now and then.
And we are not going to spend the money to service the Hubble so that it can continue to provide such insights… How insightful on the part of NASA.
Tom
#9, The money to service the Hubble was redirected to a Haliburton contract to provide mechanical potato peelers to the Navy.
Peeling potato’s for sailors is vitally important. Besides, who wants to spend all that money to travel to other planets that might not be there when we get there anyway? 🙂
This kind of science, and the stuff Alix was posting and talking about(older cultures) and of course the 2076 Presidential elections, really are why I wish I could be around for a million years or so.
Who will think of the star children? I thought playing tag was banned. Hillary WHERE ARE YOU??
Did you ever read the “Slow Glass” series of sci-fi short stories?
I didn’t know there was a series, but I do remember reading one very sad one.
8,
I just turned 45 Monday. I’m still an immature geek, tho.
13,
There was a group of the stories, a few of them were quite sad. But that’s the nature of distorted time, IMHO. One can accumulate regrets wholesale.
(For those who didn’t read the stories, “Slow Glass” was glass that light took a Looooong time to travel through. It’s virtual thickness was measured in time, not distance. One of the saddest involved a man who had a slow-glass window where he could see old images of his dead family playing in his now-empty house from the front yard.)
“But now a Danish physicist and her team of collaborators have found a way to slow light down …
Addressing a conference in the US, Dr Hau said that you could almost send out a beam of light, go for a cup of coffee and return in time to see the light come out…”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/655518.stm
RBG