It's a dance that took place millions of years ago, but this galactic collision is so spectacular that the Hubble Space Telescope has taken another peek.
In the image snapped by the Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA and ESA's famous space telescope is the once-spiral galaxy NGC 4485, which is seen to be irregularly shaped with a strange, vibrant stream of stars and other cosmic material trailing after it.
Its irregularity is due to a galactic collision that occurred roughly 30 million light-years away from Earth, a report from ESA has revealed.
A Galactic Collision
When NGC 4485 slammed into a larger galaxy named NGC 4490-which is out of frame to the bottom right of the featured image-the second galaxy's much stronger gravity warped NGC 4485's shape into something nearly unrecognizable. What used to be an orderly system of stars, gas, and dust became a chaotic, spectacular mess.
At the point seen in the photo, NGC 4485 and NGC 4490 are already past their closest approach and are now traveling away from each other. However, the gravitational force between the pair continues to warp both galaxies as the epic collision has given rise to the perfect conditions for star formation.
Between the two galaxies now lie a stream of newborn stars, gas, and dust extending to roughly 25 light-years long. Within this stream of cosmic material, there are massive star formation regions where young, brilliant blue stars have burst into life, as seen in the photo.
These hot blue stars typically live short lives, since they burn through their fuel extremely quickly and end up dying in spectacular explosions.
While the stars created by the collision are relatively short-lived, it's not just stars that make up the dense stream of material between the two galaxies. The epic clash between NGC 4485 and NGC 4490-as well as the explosive deaths of the blue stars-produced heavier elements and sent new material out into the universe, which will go on to form other types of stars and cosmic objects.
In the early days of the universe when it was much smaller and galaxies were much closer to each other, such collisions were extremely common. These events produced the abundance of cosmic material necessary to form the billions of stars, planets, and galaxies in existence today.
The New NGC 4485
Before the collision, galaxy NGC 4485 is believed to be a regular spiral galaxy, but now it's oddly shaped with two distinct regions. The region on the left of the image kept elements of its original spiral structure, but the other region shows how the gravitational force between the two colliding galaxies tore a part of the galaxy away.
As seen in the image, the "torn" piece of the galaxy made up the stream of material that erupted into hot, blue stars and prominent pink clouds of nebula.
The collision event and the stunning aftermath gave the pair a spot in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which is a collection of 338 of the "strangest looking galaxies and galaxy groups then known to exist."
