Hubble Takes Pictures of Colliding Galaxies

Jerry Smith writes "The Register reports that the Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong, and took snapshots of two colliding galaxies. The sizes average between thousands and hundreds of thousand light years, containing ten million to one trillion stars. The process took hundreds of millions of years, and will take many more hundreds of millions of years."

Comments

collision

[sporkme]

Just... wow. Great to see that there is life in the old girl yet. Our galaxy is to suffer a similar fate, some 3 billion years hence.

Re:collision

[Scutter]

I remember reading, as a kid, an article in some kids' magazine about the creation of the mirror for the Hubble. In particular, I remember reading about this hairline crack they found and how they weren't sure if it would destroy the mirror altogether. Ultimately, to fix it, they cored out the area, leaving a small circular hole. When they finished polishing, the mirror (even with the hole) was even more accurate than they had originally hoped. It's kinda cool to still see pictures and science like this from an instrument I (sort of) grew up with.

Re:collision

[robbak]

I don't know about your story, but I do know that the focal length of the hubble miror was wrong, and they only detected it when it was actually in space, due to damage (lost chip of paint IIRC) to a mesuremant device.
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/mis sions/sts-103/hubble/archive/900914.html : Search for "hubble glasses" reveals others.

Higher quality image

[bcat24]

You can find a really high resolution copy (3915x3885 as a TIFF or JPEG) of the image here. Hmm, this might make a pretty desktop wallpaper.

what is this 10^8 number of years?

[surfsalot]

you mean 6000? Cause thats how long ago God created the universe...

Seriously, instead of funding real science like the hubble and other versatile projects, we're funding crazy "man to mars" missions and finishing the ISS so that we can dump it into the ocean... we could probably stand to have a decent collider project here (on earth) also, to compete with some of the others that are soon to come online / being proposed. Either that or we can all move to mars, or wait for God to come back.

Re:what is this 10^8 number of years?

[pimpimpim]

Funny indeed that the same government that does not object to the ideas of creationism, is at the same time supporting space exploration.

Or maybe stopping the support for the hubble is in line with this, as all this research about billions-year old galaxies is of course blasphemous, while the our own solar system is of course only 6000 years old.

It's all so funny, I wish I could laugh about it :(

Re:Should I panic now or wait a billion years firs

[Gryle]

I think this just falls under the "Damn Cool" category.

Re:Should I panic now or wait a billion years firs

[wanerious]

Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?

Um, none? I suppose I could try to think of some technological offshoot of current astrophysical science, but to be safe let's just round down to 0. Is this "practicality" the metric by which you think we ought to measure all scientific findings?

Can anyone explain what knowledge is gained from these pretty pictures?

Ah, now this is easier. Watching a close interaction between galaxies helps understand collisions we see happening further away, and tightens constraints on cosmological and galactic evolution models (the latter is what I worked on). Of course the pretty pictures are shown to the public --- we're far more interested in the high-resolution spectra of these regions. Starburst regions are of intense interest because of the degree to which the nebulae are enriched promptly with elements like sulfer, silicon, and oxygen (from high-mass, short-lived stars). Then when we see these bright regions in more distant galaxies with a certain ratio of elemental abundances we can make a guess as to the age of the region and perhaps the embedding galaxy. The spectra of many regions also gives us dynamic information about the system's interaction, yielding a good estimate of the total mass interacting gravitationally. We can use these more precise measurements to constrain galactic dark matter models and distributions. And I'm sure there are a hundred other areas of specialized research that will be influenced by high-resolution data of galactic collisions.

Amazing

[Starker_Kull]

Anyone who says that they don't understand why people find science beautiful need to be directed to this photo for a clue.

Re:Amazing

[Nimey]

Just so you know, that and pretty much any astronomical picture is false-color. Still pretty, but scientists gave it a helping hand.

Re:Amazing

[Chosen Reject]

But then you would be wrong. Artisits have nothing to do with these pictures. Several images are taken in different spectrums which are grayscale versions of those pictures. Then the grayscale is put into red, green, or blue only color and three of them combined to make one picture. False color yes, because the spectrums the grayscale pictures are taken are not necessarily red, green and blue, but artists have nothing to do with it. Sometimes they choose color spectrums to enhance, sometimes to make it look natural, but artists never touch these images.

Naked eye with a big amateur scope

[Zenicetus]

This is a very cool object, and because it's (relatively) close, it's visible to the human eyeball in a large amateur telescope, at a dark sky site (not QUITE like this Hubble image, obviously).

I've tracked it down in my old 18" Newtonian/Dobsonian. With averted vision, you can see two "tails" twisting off the pair, much further out in the field than these Hubble images. Here's what it looks like in an amateur scope, but imagine it as just a dim hint in the eyepiece:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1997/34/images/ c/formats/web.jpg

It's nothing at all like the Hubble image... just a hint of grey glow in the eyepiece, but still... there is something about seeing the actual photons from the object hitting your retina that's exciting, for us amateur astronomy geeks, anyway.

From the photo...

[gardyloo]

... it looks like *someone* is highly anticipating the release of Debian 'Etch'....

Re:Should I panic now or wait a billion years firs

[Gr8Apes]

Considering that in about 5 billion years time it's projected that earth will be inside the sun (a red giant by that time) I think you'll have other things to panic over...

Re:Should I panic now or wait a billion years firs

[mikael]

Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?

A greater understanding of the laws of gravity. We can construct simulations of colliding galaxies, but being able to see the real thing helps confirm those theories.

Re:There is life in those galaxies

[Chosen Reject]

You don't have to look so far away. The Milky Way is not all that quiet seeing as how we have a galaxy passing right through us right now as well. The Canis Major Dwarf is closer to Earth the center of the Milky Way.