These two “colliding” galaxies paint a wonderful double picture

Distant orange and white galaxies overlap each other in space.

only when we You begin to forget the old Hubble Space TtelescopeIt’s coming back with another great look at the universe. He. She’Latest goal? Two spiral galaxies, more than a billion light-years from Earth, appear to collide.

To be clear: THey actually not anywhere near each other, but from Hubble’s perspective, one outperforms the other. The galaxies are named SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, and were imaged by Hubble as part of the Galaxy Zoo Project, a citizen science project dedicated to classifying the countless galaxies in the visible universe.

A zoomable version of the image can be viewed over here. You can see many other light sources around galaxies, especially other galaxies.

The image may not look as clear as Webb Space T.Escope Pictures. web It can see dim light sources with better accuracy than Hubble; One of the modern deep fields It was taken from 690 individual images that capture many more galaxies than in the last Hubble image.

It is not uncommon for galaxies to overlap from our perspective. early example of was web A 150 million pixel shot of Stefan’s pentagona group of five galaxies that appear to orbit together, even though only two galaxies in the group interact with each other.

Galactic interference video

But Webb also sees a different light than Hubble. Web images are mostly in infrared and near-infrared wavelengths – useful for seeing old light skewed to red. Hubble images mostly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

long Hubble A career as a space observatory has hit some bumps Recently. many times In the past few years, the telescope has been forced into safe mode While engineers on the ground came up with technical issues related to The spacecraft, launched in 1991. But the telescope faltered.

Webb is widely considered to be the successor to Hubble, but as the veteran telescope shows With this dazzling image, it cannot be replaced. exactly the contrary, It has a unique way of seeing the cosmic animal of our universe, and who are we to refuse such a feast for the eyes?

More: Rebooted Hubble telescope wastes no time, captures cool new photos of misfit galaxies

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