Elain Brown Science 02.12.2022 13:Feb PM EST

NASA Captures Interacting Galaxy Pair Arp 282 Through Hubble Space Telescope

NASA and the ESA captured two galaxies interacting with one another.

NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture the cosmic interaction called Arp 282, which is composed of the NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top).

Amusingly, both galaxies that Arp 282 are composed of have massively energetic cores known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although they are not visible in the image.

However, this is actually quite fortunate because if the full emission of two AGNs were visible in this image, it would most likely obscure the exquisitely detailed tidal interactions between NGC 169 and IC 1559.

Capturing Interacting Galaxy Pair

The Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting the Earth for the last three decades, has been our cosmic eye. It has been able to see things so far away that it's hard to believe. This is another object that the instrument made by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has found. This is what helps us understand how a galaxy evolves.

📷 This NASA/ESA @HUBBLE_space Telescope image shows Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair composed of galaxies NGC 169 (bottom) and IC 1559 (top) 👉 https://t.co/Qf1fSjmZG2 pic.twitter.com/hjRsr32N4C
— ESA (@esa) February 7, 2022

According to NASA, The way galaxies interact is now thought to be a big part of how they change over time. Each time two galaxies interact, their shapes and structures change.

This is because galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past each other. As common as these interactions may be, it is very rare to get a picture of two galaxies interacting in this way.

Galaxy Composition

As reported by ESA, a lot of gas, dust, and even whole solar systems will be pulled away from one galaxy and toward the other when two galaxies come together. This is because of the tidal forces. This process can be seen in action in this picture, with small streams of matter connecting the two galaxies.

There are tidal forces when one object's gravity makes another object distort or stretch. In this case, the tidal forces will move away from the low-mass object and toward the high-mass object.

A galaxy is a group of stars, dust, gas, and dark matter held together by gravity and moves in the same direction. Galaxies can have anywhere from a few hundred million stars to a hundred trillion stars in them.

They are held together by the gravitational pull of their own mass. A small dwarf galaxy has a few million stars, but the biggest known galaxies can have up to a hundred trillion stars, which makes them very big.

Hubble Space Telescope

This picture, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, looks very three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery.

As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is very rare to get a picture of two galaxies interacting in this way.

Hubble has also seen beautiful, rare events in which galaxies merge together. During these events, galaxies change dramatically in their appearance and stellar content.

There are galaxies of all shapes and sizes, including elliptical, spiral, and irregular galaxies and dwarf galaxies. Hubble Space Telescope has taken pictures of and studied galaxies of all kinds.