The Antennae from the Great Observatories
Here’s a Chandra release from the Antennae Galaxies. The compilation of the colliding galaxies can be a collaborative effort by Chandra, Hubble and the Spitzer Room telescopes. I’ve included the press release below, but there is also a video on the Chandra website and you’ll be able to access much more and larger images including desktops so be certain to have a look.
The Chandra press release:
A stunning new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA’s Good Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite graphic from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold), along with the Spitzer Space Telescope (red).
The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas inside the galaxies. The most massive of these young stars have already sped via their evolution in a few million many years and exploded as supernovas.
The X-ray picture from Chandra shows massive clouds of hot, interstellar gas that have been injected with rich deposits of elements from supernova explosions. This enriched gas, which includes elements such as oxygen, iron, magnesium and silicon, will be incorporated into new generations of stars and planets. The bright, point-like sources in the graphic are produced by material falling onto black holes and neutron stars that happen to be remnants on the massive stars. Some of these black holes may have masses that happen to be nearly one hundred times that from the Sun.
The Spitzer data show infrared light from warm dust clouds that have been heated by newborn stars, with the brightest clouds lying in the overlap region between the two galaxies. The Hubble information reveal old stars in red, filaments of dust in brown and star-forming regions in yellow and white. Numerous in the fainter objects within the optical graphic are clusters containing thousands of stars.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms,” seen in wide-angle views in the system. These functions were produced by tidal forces generated from the collision.
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI
