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Cosmic Collisions - European HST Scientists Catch Merging Galaxies in the Act
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Home Hubble Takes a Look at Tangled… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Takes a Look at Tangled Galaxies
This Hubble image features a pair of interacting spiral galaxies called MCG+05-31-045. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz)
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image depicts the cosmic tangle that is MCG+05-31-045, a pair of interacting galaxies located 390 million light-years away and a part of the Coma galaxy cluster.
The Coma Cluster is a particularly rich cluster that contains over a thousand known galaxies. Amateur astronomers can easily spot several of these in a backyard telescope (See Caldwell 35). Most of them are elliptical galaxies, and that’s typical of a dense galaxy cluster like the Coma Cluster: many elliptical galaxies form through close encounters between galaxies that stir them up, or even collisions that rip them apart. While the stars in interacting galaxies can stay together, their gas is twisted and compressed by gravitational forces and rapidly used up to form new stars. When the hot, massive, blue stars die, there is little gas left to form new generations of young stars to replace them. As spiral galaxies interact, gravity disrupts the regular orbits that produce their striking spiral arms. Whether through mergers or simple near misses, the result is a galaxy almost devoid of gas, with aging stars orbiting in uncoordinated circles: an elliptical galaxy.
It’s very likely that a similar fate will befall MCG+05-31-045. As the smaller spiral galaxy is torn up and integrated into the larger galaxy, many new stars will form, and the hot, blue ones will quickly burn out, leaving cooler, redder stars behind in an elliptical galaxy, much like others in the Coma Cluster. But this process won’t be complete for many millions of years.
Explore more Coma Cluster images from Hubble.
Hubble Uncovers Thousands of Globular Star Clusters Scattered Among Galaxies Hubble’s Galaxies With Knots, Bursts Hubble Sees Near and Far Hubble Sees Plunging Galaxy Losing Its Gas Hubble Catches Galaxies Swarmed by Star Clusters Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Nov 14, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Hubble Space Telescope Spiral Galaxies Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
Cosmic Origins
What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
Galactic Origins
SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
Water’s Origins
SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
Big Picture
Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2024-152
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Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This mosaic from ESA’s Euclid space telescope contains 260 observations in visible and infrared light. It covers 132 square degrees, or more than 500 times the area of the full Moon, and is 208 gigapixels. This is 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture during its six-year mission.ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO This section of the Euclid mosaic is zoomed in 36 times, revealing the core of galaxy cluster Abell 3381, 470 million light-years from Earth. The image, made using both visible and infrared light, shows galaxies of different shapes and sizes, including elliptical, spiral, and dwarf galaxies.ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO This image shows an area of the Euclid mosaic zoomed in 150 times. The combination of visible and infrared light reveals galaxies that are interacting with each other in cluster Abell 3381, 470 million light-years away from Earth. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO The location and actual size of the newly released Euclid mosaic is highlighted in yellow on a map of the entire sky captured by ESA’s Planck mission and a star map from ESA’s Gaia mission. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA and the Planck Collaboration. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO With contributions from NASA, the mission will map a third of the sky in order to study a cosmic mystery called dark energy.
ESA (the European Space Agency) has released a new, 208-gigapixel mosaic of images taken by Euclid, a mission with NASA contributions that launched in 2023 to study why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Astronomers use the term “dark energy” in reference to the unknown cause of this accelerated expansion.
The new images were released at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan on Oct. 15.
The mosaic contains 260 observations in visible and infrared light made between March 25 and April 8 of this year. In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the southern sky — more than 500 times the area of the sky covered by a full Moon.
The mosaic accounts for 1% of the wide survey Euclid will conduct over six years. During this survey, the telescope observes the shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies out to a distance of more than 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will create the largest 3D cosmic map ever made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ZCsUfgLRQ Dive into a snippet of the great cosmic atlas being produced by the ESA Euclid mission. This video zooms in on a 208-gigapixel mosaic containing about 14 million galaxies and covering a portion of the southern sky more than 500 times the area of the full Moon as seen from Earth. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA/Planck Collaboration This first piece of the map already contains around 100 million stars and galaxies. Some 14 million of these galaxies could be used by Euclid to study the hidden influence of dark energy on the universe.
“We have already seen beautiful, high-resolution images of individual objects and groups of objects from Euclid. This new image finally gives us a taste of the enormity of the area of sky Euclid will cover, which will enable us to take detailed measurements of billions of galaxies,” said Jason Rhodes, an observational cosmologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who is the U.S. science lead for Euclid and principal investigator for NASA’s Euclid dark energy science team.
Galaxies Galore
Even though this patch of space shows only 1% of Euclid’s total survey area, the spacecraft’s sensitive cameras captured an incredible number of objects in great detail. Enlarging the image by a factor of 600 reveals the intricate structure of a spiral galaxy in galaxy cluster Abell 3381, 470 million light-years away.
This section of the Euclid mosaic is zoomed in 600 times. A single spiral galaxy is visible in great detail within cluster Abell 3381, 470 million light-years away from us. Data from both the visible and infrared light instruments on Euclid are included. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO “What really strikes me about these new images is the tremendous range in physical scale,” said JPL’s Mike Seiffert, project scientist for the NASA contribution to Euclid. “The images capture detail from clusters of stars near an individual galaxy to some of the largest structures in the universe. We are beginning to see the first hints of what the full Euclid data will look like when it reaches the completion of the prime survey.”
Visble as well are clouds of gas and dust located between the stars in our own galaxy. Sometimes called “galactic cirrus” because they look like cirrus clouds at Earth, these clouds can be observed by Euclid’s visible-light camera because they reflect visible light from the Milky Way.
The mosaic released today is taste of what’s to come from Euclid. The mission plans to release 53 square degrees of the Euclid survey, including a preview of the Euclid Deep Field areas, in March 2025 and to release its first year of cosmology data in 2026.
NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman mission will also study dark energy — in ways that are complementary to Euclid. Mission planners will use Euclid’s findings to inform Roman’s dark energy work. Scheduled to launch by May 2027, Roman will study a smaller section of sky than Euclid but will provide higher-resolution images of millions of galaxies and peer deeper into the universe’s past, providing complementary information. In addition, Roman will survey nearby galaxies, find and investigate planets throughout our galaxy, study objects on the outskirts of our solar system, and more.
More About Euclid
Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium — consisting of more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 15 European countries, the United States, Canada, and Japan — is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the payload module, including the telescope. Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision Programme.
Three NASA-supported science teams contribute to the Euclid mission. In addition to designing and fabricating the sensor-chip electronics for Euclid’s Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument, JPL led the procurement and delivery of the NISP detectors as well. Those detectors, along with the sensor chip electronics, were tested at NASA’s Detector Characterization Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Euclid NASA Science Center at IPAC (ENSCI), at Caltech in Pasadena, California, will archive the science data and support U.S.-based science investigations. JPL is a division of Caltech.
For more information about Euclid go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/euclid/main/index.html
For more information about Roman, go to:
https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
ESA Media Relations
media@esa.int
2024-141
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Last Updated Oct 15, 2024 Related Terms
Euclid Astrophysics Dark Energy Dark Matter Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Universe Explore More
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On 15 October 2024, ESA’s Euclid space mission reveals the first piece of its great map of the Universe, showing millions of stars and galaxies.
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