Explanation:
Slide your cursor over the image to identify three members of this
intriguing
gathering of galaxies.
Known as the NGC 7771 Group, they lie
almost 200 million light-years away toward the high flying
constellation
Pegasus.
The largest galaxy, barred spiral
NGC 7771, is
itself about 75,000
light-years across, but will someday find itself part of a larger
galaxy still.
As the galaxies of the group make repeated close passages,
they will finally
merge into one very large galaxy.
Played out over hundreds of millions of years, the process is
understood to be
a normal part of the evolution of
galaxies, including
our own Milky Way.
Editor's Note: The labeled version of the image was generated
by Astrometry.net.
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