A new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the collision of three distant galaxies in the constellation of Cancer.
The image shows the dust mass and bright star swirls from the merger of distant galaxies IC 2431, located 681 million light years from Earth.
Compact galaxies are also known as LEDA 25476, Mrk 1224 or UGC 4756, and were first discovered on February 24, 1896 by French astronomer Stéphane Gavel.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a “circular galactic trio” merger, as well as a turbulent mix of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio.
The center of this image is obscured by a thick cloud of dust, although light from a background galaxy is penetrating its outer edges. And the “Live Science” website, in the news reported by “Russia Today”, yesterday, said that this cosmic collision is known as a tri-galactic merger, when three galaxies slowly approach each other and rupture each other with competing gravitational forces.
Mergers like this are common throughout the universe, and all large galaxies, including our own, the Milky Way, owe their great size to violent mergers like these.
Chaotic as they may sound, mergers like these are more regarding creation than destruction. When gas from the three neighboring galaxies collides and condenses, a vast “sea” of material from which new stars will emerge is collected at the center of the newly united galaxy.
Meanwhile, existing stars will mostly survive collapse, while a “tug-of-war” between the three galaxies will distort the orbital trajectories of many existing stars, and there is so much space between those stars that relatively few are likely to collide.
