Colliding galaxies form stunning 'cosmic kaleidoscope' in ESA image (PHOTO)
The European Space agency has shared an incredibly serene and beautiful picture of two distant galaxy clusters as they approach one another for collision.
The two clusters, even though they have not yet fully collided, are now known as one object named MACS J0416.
The ESA notes that the alignment of dark matter with “blue-hued hot gas” indicates that the clusters have not collided yet - if they had, “the dark matter and gas would have separated”.
MACS J0416 is located in the Eridanus constellation - some 4.3 billion light-years from Earth - so it’s safe to say we’ll be admiring these collisions safely from afar for the foreseeable future.
The image is a combination of data from three separate telescopes: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA CHANDRA X-ray Observatory, and the NRAO Jansky Very Large Array.
Together, these telescopes show scientists three aspects of the collision site in detail; Hubble is responsible for the galaxies and stars, Chandra the diffuse emission in blue, and Jansky the diffuse emission in pink.
The ESA says MACS J016 is “playing a leading role in the Hubble Frontier Fields programme” and leading astronomers in the discovery of galaxies that existed “only hundreds of millions of years after the big bang”.
