Astronomy

This pidture shows two spiral galaxies pass by each other in the direction of the constellation Canis Major. The near-collision has been caught in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February, 2004.

The larger and more massive galaxy is cataloged as NGC 2207 (on the left in this image), and the smaller one on the right is IC 2163. Strong tidal forces from NGC 2207 have distorted the shape of IC 2163, flinging out stars and gas into long streamers stretching out a hundred thousand light-years toward the right-hand edge of the image.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)

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