A little in the shadow of its cousin the James Webb telescope, Hubble is still in service and continues its long-term observation missions! This time, he photographed the merger of two galaxies forming a huge ring, 670 million light-years from Earth. And it’s not over.
Not bad for a 32-year-old telescope… To see the image in high definition, go to the NASA website.
He doesn’t look his age
Is it in old pans that we see the best galaxies? The question of the age of the Hubble telescope regularly brings up the debate on its replacement, on the possibility of carrying out a service mission (despite the retirement of the American STS shuttles) or of bringing it back to Earth to pamper it in a museum, after everything he brought to the observation of the cosmos.
However in this debate we sometimes forget how efficient Hubble still is. So much so that the calendar which lists the requests and observations allocated to the various laboratories is always full for the years to come. And the images are still stunning.
Collision Catalog
Here, Hubble captured the image of Arp-Madore 417-391, a collision of two galaxies, the rare violence of which formed a gigantic ring of millions of stars. No need to keep the young ones away, these events take place over millions of years and strictly speaking, it’s not as if the Solar Systems are crashing into each other… but their galactic dance does. will never be the same again.
This merger of two galaxies, which takes place 670 million light-years from Earth (in the constellation Eridanus, visible from the southern hemisphere) is part of the Arp-Madore catalog. This is a collection of those collisions between galaxies, sometimes slow and smooth, other times like with 417-391, forming a real spectacle. We owe it to the ACS instrument, theAdvanced Camera Survey.
Preparing the work of the Webb
And since Hubble is less mentioned in favor of the James Webb, this does not prevent the two telescopes from working together. Indeed, the Arp-Madore catalog is useful for preparing future targets for JWST images, by significantly reducing the number of candidates to observe depending on the theme of the study. This is how the new “star” telescope for understanding our universe can prioritize its topics. The evolution of clusters of galaxies and mergers/collisions makes it possible to learn more about dark matter, in particular.
Source : NASA
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