Link HERE
Posted on 04/21/2011 6:56:42 AM PDT by paul in cape
Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273
Explanation: The spiky stars in the foreground of this sharp cosmic portrait are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy.
The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years.
Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters.
Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810), the galaxies do look peculiar, but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common in the universe.
In fact, the nearby large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be some 2 million light-years away and approaching the Milky Way.
Arp 273 may offer an analog of their far future encounter. Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale can ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars.
From our perspective, the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are separated by only a little over 100,000 light-years.
The release of this stunning vista celebrates the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit.
Link HERE
Awesome! That one is a keeper!
My G*D in THE AWESOME G*D!!! You all should see what the sky looks like at night 2 or 3K miles out to sea under independenct steaming. JUST AWEINSPIREING!
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice (Father, Son & Holy Spirit)
goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Psalm 19:1-4
Simple Amazing.
CRAZYBEAUTIFUL
WOW!!
My God.
Lord, you do really nice work.
The more we discover about our universe, the more beautiful it becomes.
Yet in all the cosmos we are Alone.
This may have been asked before, are these actual photos from Hubble or “artist rendition” or “enhanced for clarity from non-visible wavelength photos”?
To some degree yes, if its someone else’s rendition then it is no more than a painting, beautiful or not it is not the real thing “of beauty”. Are the colors real or just picked to dazzle viewers of the photgraph?
To my thinking a “photograph” is not retouched and is precisely what you would see if in a position to see it first-hand. If something has been done to the photgraph, then they should be upfront about it, not pretend this is the way nature looks.
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