Folk Culture

A Galactic Chain

1 min read

2 days ago Rene Solomon

A pair of interacting galaxies, one smaller than the other. They appear as a broad, soft glow in which individual stars can’t be seen. A number of bright stars and smaller, background galaxies can also be seen — three such galaxies lie in a vertical line below the right-hand galaxy of the pair. — ESA / Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey / DOE / FNAL / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA

Day 20 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: a galactic chain. This Hubble image features an interacting galaxy system known as Arp-Madore 2105-332, that lies about 200 million light-years from Earth. This image also reveals several further galaxies, not associated with this system but fortuitously positioned in such a way that they appear to be forming a line that approaches the leftmost component of Arp-Madore 2105-332.

See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.