Crashing galaxies win contest
Posted: Monday, March 02, 2009 4:40 PM by Alan Boyle
Halton C. Arp / NED / Caltech |
Hubble's team will improve upon this
black-and-white view of the interacting
galaxies known as Arp 274.
|
The people have spoken, and that means the tangled-up group of galaxies known as Arp 274 will get an exclusive photo shoot with the Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxies won almost half of the 139,944 votes cast in the Hubble team's first-ever "People's Choice" ballot.
Arp 274, which appears to be a cosmic smash-up involving two (or maybe three) galaxies, has never been seen before in high resolution. It was one of six astronomical targets offered for consideration by the Hubble team over the past month in its "You Decide" contest.
When all was said and done, Arp 274 garnered 67,021 votes by Sunday's deadline. Its closest competitor was the beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 5172 (with 26,987 votes), which could well deserve the full Hubble treatment as well.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the interacting galaxies were the winners. "Hubble has shown that interacting galaxies are very photogenic because, under the relentless pull of gravity, they weave elegant twisted lanes of dust and stars, and brilliant blue clusters of newborn stars," the Hubble team said in today's announcement of the winner.
In his buildup to the vote, astronomer Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute said that the details of the galactic tangle can't be seen well in the black-and-white imagery that's been taken to date. "I guarantee you, when Hubble takes a look at this, you'll be able to see all sorts of detail in these interacting galaxies," he said.
Hubble will release its full-color picture during the "100 Hours of Astronomy" celebration, scheduled April 2-5 as part of the International Year of Astronomy. That view will no doubt be added to a wide array of cool cosmic crash scenes that have been captured over the years. Here's a sampling that should whet your appetite for April's stunner:
- Arp 87's starry tangle has a seductive look to it, but it might have been a stretch to say the scene was "X-rated." Maybe I just had an overactive imagination at the time.
- Two colliding galaxies provide a preview of what our Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda Galaxy might be doing billions of years from now. The Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared view makes the galactic pairing look like a party mask for Halloween (or Mardi Gras).
- "The Mice" are a classic pair of long-tailed galaxies captured by Hubble's camera. The starry tails, extending out for thousands of light-years, have been pulled into existence by gravitational interactions between the galaxies.
- For much, much more, check out this gallery of interacting galaxies at the University of Alabama as well as our own growing space gallery.
