NGC 520:哈勃拍摄的互撞星系

NGC 520:哈勃拍摄的互撞星系

2021年9月7日 NGC 520: Colliding Galaxies from Hubble Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: William Ostling (The Astronomy Enthusiast) Explanation: Is this one galaxy or two? The jumble of stars, gas, and dust that is NGC 520 is now thought to incorporate the remains of two separate disk galaxies. A defining component of NGC 520 — as seen in great detail in the featured image from the Hubble Space Telescope — is its band of intricately interlaced dust running vertically down the spine of the colliding galaxies. A similar looking collision might be expected in a few billion years when our disk Milky Way Galaxy to collides with our large-disk galactic neighbor Andromeda (M31). The collision that defines NGC 520 started about 300 million…