Two galaxies, NGC 1512 and NGC 1510, They have been in the process of merger for 400 million years. This interaction triggered a wave of star formation, as seen in an unpublished image released Tuesday (3).
Board (Look up) is also filled with the bright Milky Way stars seen in the foreground, with the background filled with even more distant galaxies.
Telescope captures ‘dance’ of merging galaxies 400 million years ago
The “dance” was recorded at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, located about 80 km from the Chilean city of La Serena, near the Atacama Desert. According to the researchers, the stream of starlight that extends between the two signals that the larger galaxy is “covering” the smaller galaxy – There is evidence that there is a gravitational interaction between them.
As a result, the connection between NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 affected the rate of star formation of both, according to scientists, and They may merge into a single, even larger galaxy in the future, They are located at a distance of 60 million light years from Earth, with 1 light year being approximately equal to 9.5 trillion km.
The Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile — Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/CTIO/AURA/D.Munizaga
This image is from the 4-meter Victor M., located at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Blanco telescope.
It has one of the world’s best performing wide-field-of-view cameras: the Dark Energy Camera or, in English, the Dark Energy Camera. dark energy camera (DECAM). It was made to lead dark energy surveyA six-year space observation project (2013 to 2019) involving over 400 scientists from 25 institutions and seven countries.
International effort to map galaxies, detect supernovae and discover patterns of cosmic structure – the search for the details of dark energy accelerating the expansion of the universe.
