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Interacting Galaxies

Caption:

A pair of interacting spiral galaxies. The brightness of the image has been converted to color (a technique called pseudo-color) in order to show the fainter regions (in dark blue to green) more clearly, while still not saturating the brighter regions (shown as red turning to white). This two-minute exposure was taken on the night of September 26th 1994. It is located approximately 200 million light-years from Earth.

Important: Use of this image is restricted. Please see “NOAO/AURA CONDITIONS OF USE” (below) for complete information.

More about this Image
This interesting pair of interacting spiral galaxies was first described in the Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled in 1966. The larger member is strongly tidally distorted, looking almost as though one side of the galaxy has been placed under a magnifying glass. The edge-on companion however, retains a relatively undisturbed spiral disk, but has a luminous, heavily obscured but infrared-bright, star-burst nucleus. The nucleus of the large spiral, by way of a contrast, contains a low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (or LINER), which is indicative of much less activity than the bright nuclear region of its companion. This is an interesting example of the very different responses that different galaxies can have to interaction with their companions: the large galaxy has a shredded disk but essentially nothing in its nucleus, while the small galaxy has an undisturbed disk but a very active nucleus.
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NOAO/AURA CONDITIONS OF USE
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Interacting Galaxies
(Preview Only)

Credit: Credit WIYN/NOAO/AURA/NSF
Year of Image: 1994

Categories:

ASTRONOMY / General

Formats Available:

TIFF Format - 156K - 400 x 400 pixel image - 72 DPI

Sorry! This image is not available in a higher resolution.

Restrictions:

See “NOAO/AURA CONDITIONS OF USE,” under caption (above).

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Last Modified: Mar 29, 2001