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Crash of the titans
NGC 520 — also known as Arp 157 — looks like a galaxy in the midst of exploding. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. Two enormous spiral galaxies are crashing into each other, melding and forming a new conglomerate. This happens slowly, over millions of years — the whole process started some 300 million years ago. The object, about 100 000 light-years across, is now in the middle stage of the merging process, as the two nuclei haven’t merged yet, but the two discs have. The merger features a tail of stars and a prominent dust lane. NGC 520 is one of the brightest interacting galaxies in the sky and lies in the direction of Pisces (the Fish), approximately 100 million light-years from Earth. This image was taken by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile. It is based on data obtained through B, V, R and H-alpha filters.
Arp 157
NGC 520
1630
658
551
445
EFOSC2
EFOSC2
EFOSC2
EFOSC2
Optical
Optical
Optical
Optical
959.0
959.0
C.5.1.7
Orange
Red
Green
Blue
H-alpha
R
V
B
-8.762172e-05
8.762172e-05
505.684123853
497.996148052
21.144775
3.791666
ESO 3.6-metre telescope
ESO 3.6-metre telescope
ESO 3.6-metre telescope
ESO 3.6-metre telescope
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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