This cosmic encounter is known as Arp 122 and is seen here as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
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Two spiral galaxies, NGC 6040 and NGC 6039, are merging together at the right side of this Hubble image. NGC 6039 is seen face-on and is circular in shape. NGC 6040 seems to lie in front of the first one. In the lower-left corner, cut off by the frame, the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041 — a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in — appears as light radiating from a point. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Dark Energy Camera, which is mounted on NSF’s Víctor M. Blanco 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / J. Dalcanton / Dark Energy Survey / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / L. Shatz.
Arp 122 is located approximately 570 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Hercules.
The system consists of two galaxies: the tilted, warped spiral galaxy NGC 6040 and the face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6039.
“Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic events, but they take place on a very slow timescale,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.
“For example, our Milky Way Galaxy is on track to collide with its nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, but these two galaxies have a good 4 billion years to go before they actually meet.”
“The process of colliding and merging will not be a quick one either: it might take hundreds of millions of years to unfold.”
“These collisions take so long because of the truly massive distances involved.”
“Galaxies are composed of stars and their solar systems, dust and gas,” the researchers added.
“In galactic collisions, therefore, these constituent components may experience enormous changes in the gravitational forces acting on them.”
“In time, this completely changes the structure of the two (or more) colliding galaxies, and sometimes ultimately results in a single, merged galaxy.”
“That may well be what results from the collision pictured in this image.”
“Galaxies that result from mergers are thought to have a regular or elliptical structure, as the merging process disrupts more complex structures (such as those observed in spiral galaxies).”
“It would be fascinating to know what Arp 122 will look like once this collision is complete, but that will not happen for a long, long time.”
