NASA’s space telescopes have captured, 62 million light years from Earth, a collision of two galaxies that began 100 million years ago and is still continuing . The spectacular image published by the space agency has been obtained by combining those taken by the cameras of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer.
This collision has caused the formation of millions of stars in the gas and dust clouds of the galaxies . The most massive of the young stars ended their days exploding as a supernova. X-ray images from the Chandra Observatory (in blue) show huge clouds of hot interstellar gas enriched with elements from the explosion of supernovae, including oxygen, iron, magnesium and silicon . On the other hand, the bright spots in the image correspond to the light emitted by the material that falls into massive black holes and neutron stars (remnants of massive stars).
Data from the Spitzer telescope shows infrared light coming from hot dust clouds that have increased in temperature due to the birth of new stars. Meanwhile, Hubble captures show older stars in red , dust filaments in brown, and regions of new star formation in yellow and white.
The two colliding galaxies are called Antennae due to the emergence of two large arms that look like antennas, produced by the tidal forces generated in the collision, as explained by NASA.
