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Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038-4039
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.
The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies. By age dating the clusters in the image, astronomers find that only about 10 percent of the newly formed super star clusters in the Antennae will survive beyond the first 10 million years. The vast majority of the super star clusters formed during this interaction will disperse, with the individual stars becoming part of the smooth background of the galaxy. It is however believed that about a hundred of the most massive clusters will survive to form regular globular clusters, similar to the globular clusters found in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms" extending far out from the nuclei of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes. These "tidal tails" were formed during the initial encounter of the galaxies some 200 to 300 million years ago. They give us a preview of what may happen when our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.
Object Name: NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxy
Object Description: Interacting Galaxy
Position (J2000): R.A. 12h 01m 53s.18
Dec. -18° 52' 52 ".4
Constellation: Corvus
Distance: 62 million light-years (19 Megaparsecs)
About the Data
Data Description: This image was created from HST data from proposal 10188: B. Whitmore (STScI), M. Rieke (University of Arizona), F. Schweizer (Carnegie Institution of Washington), W. Blair (Johns Hopkins University), G. Rieke (University of Arizona), C. Leitherer (STScI), A. Alonso-Herrero (Spanish National Research Council), and S. Mengel (European Southern Observatory, Germany).
Instrument: ACS/WFC
Exposure Date(s): July 21, 2004 and February 16, 2005
Exposure Time: 4.9 hours
Filters: F435W (B), F550M (y), F658N (Halpha+[N II]), and F814W (I)
About the Image
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Whitmore (STScI)
Release Date: October 17, 2006
Color
This image is a composite of many separate exposures made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope using several different filters. Four filters were used to sample broad and narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are:
F435W (B) blue
F550M (y) green
F658N (Halpha+[N II]) pink
F814W (I) red