Explanation:
NGC 6240 offers a rare glimpse of a cosmic catastrophe in its
final throes.
The titanic galaxy-galaxy
collision
is located a mere 400 million light-years away in the constellation
Ophiuchus.
One of the brightest sources in the
infrared sky, the merging galaxies
spew distorted tidal tails
of stars, gas, and dust and undergo frantic bursts of star
formation.
The two supermassive
black holes in the original galactic cores
will also coalesce into a single, even more massive black hole.
Soon, only one large galaxy will remain.
This dramatic image of the scene is a
multiwavelength composite;
red colors trace infrared emission from dust recorded by the
Spitzer Space Telescope, with Hubble visible light
images of stars and gas in green and blue hues.
The view spans over 300,000 light-years at the estimated distance
of NGC 6240.
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