Hubble celebrates 19th anniversary with fountain of youth

Source: CCTV.com | 04-24-2009 09:29

by Staff Writers from Space Daily

To commemorate the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's 19 years of success, the orbiting telescope has photographed a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light years.

With a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust  that stretches over 100,000 light-years. The most  striking feature of this galaxy troupe is the  impressive blue stream of material extending from  the northern component. This "fountain" contains  complexes of super star clusters, each one of which  may contain dozens of individual young star clusters.  The blue color is produced by the hot, massive stars  which dominate the light in each cluster. Overall,  the 'fountain' contains many millions of stars. This  picture was issued to celebrate the 19th anniversary  of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard  the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. During the past  19 years Hubble has made more than 880,000 observations  and snapped over 570,000 images of 29,000 celestial  objects. The Space Shuttle Discovery placed the Hubble  Space Telescope into Earth orbit on April 25, 1990. (AP Photo/NASA)

Over the past 19 years Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies going "bump in the night" as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind.

Just when you thought these interactions couldn't look any stranger, this image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp 194, looks as if one of the galaxies has sprung a leak.

The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of newborn blue stars. This typically happens when two galaxies interact and gravitationally tug at each other gravitationally.

Resembling a pair of owl's eyes, the two nuclei of the colliding galaxies can be seen in the process of merging at the upper left. The bizarre blue bridge of material extending out from the northern component looks as if it connects to a third galaxy but in reality this galaxy is in the background and not connected at all.