哈勃望远镜发现一颗正在合并的银河宝石

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observation has captured the galaxy CGCG 396-2, an unusual multi-armed galaxy merger which lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion.

This observation is a gem from the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science project involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world who classified galaxies to help scientists solve a problem of astronomical proportions: how to sort through the vast amounts of data generated by telescopes. A public vote selected the most astronomically intriguing objects for follow-up observations with Hubble. CGCG 396-2 is one such object, imaged here by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel

NASA/ESA哈勃太空望远镜观测到了星系CGCG396-2，这是一个不寻常的多臂星系合并，位于猎户座，距离地球约5.2亿光年。

这项观测是银河动物园项目的瑰宝，这是一个公民科学项目，涉及来自世界各地的数十万志愿者，他们对星系进行分类，以帮助科学家解决一个天文数字的问题：如何对望远镜产生的大量数据进行分类。公众投票选出了最吸引人的天体，用于哈勃望远镜的后续观测。CGCG396-2就是这样一个天体，由哈勃的高级巡天相机拍摄。

文字来源：欧洲航天局 (ESA)
图片来源：ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel