Simply a single picture of NGC 6872, you may’t assist however be impressed.
The barred spiral galaxy seems to be fairly completely different than our personal Milky Way, with two lengthy tendrils of stars emanating from reverse ends of the construction. It is as if invisible giants are enjoying tug of warfare with a spiral galaxy.
However what makes NGC 6872 actually spectacular is its extraordinary measurement — it is the largest spiral galaxy we’ve discovered to this point. From finish to finish, the galaxy stretches 522,000 light-years throughout, which makes it greater than 5 occasions bigger than the Milky Way.
A newly launched picture reveals the galaxy in its entirety, combining seen gentle photographs, far-ultraviolet knowledge, and infrared knowledge from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s now-decommissioned Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), and NASA’s now-decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively.
NGC 6872, which is situated some 212 million light-years away from Earth, is suspected to have such an elongated form as a result of its gravitational interactions with the close by disk galaxy IC4970, which harbors simply one-fifth the mass of its greater neighbor.
These gravitational interactions normally lead to a galactic merger. However on this particular case, in accordance with an evaluation of the info used to create the brand new composite picture, astronomers suspect that the interplay between the 2 galaxies is definitely producing a brand new galaxy.
“Understanding the construction and dynamics of close by interacting methods like this one brings us a step nearer to inserting these occasions into their correct cosmological context, paving the way in which to decoding what we discover in youthful, extra distant methods,” Eli Dwek, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland, stated in a 2013 statement (opens in new tab) asserting NGC 6872 as the biggest spiral galaxy we have ever seen.
Now, we simply have one query. When is the James Webb Space Telescope going to check out this galactic behemoth?
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