NGC 4038 & NGC 4039 The Antennae Galaxies

This is NGC 4038 and 4039, a pair of galaxies going through a major collision.

The collision started half a billion years ago, and they spent the past few hundred million years sparring with one another. The monstrous gravitational pull tore the galaxies apart and ejected some of the stars and interstellar gas into space. The ejected materials made the long tidal tails reminiscent of an ant’s antennae. The major collision happened near the cores, where a huge amount of dust and gas smashed into each other. This resulted in a stage of rapid star formation. The radiation from the star nurseries ionized the nearby gas clouds, causing them to glow in a pinkish-red; those are the pinkish spots you see in the centre of the image.

Such collision is not uncommon in the universe; most galaxies undergo at least one major collision in their lifetimes. Our own Milky Way is likely to endure the same fate as it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy in several billion years.

(The data was acquired from Telescopelive, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop)