(Thanks to Starts With A Bang! reader benhead.) The Hubble Space Telescope has released some beautiful images of colliding galaxies in a huge collection! Here are some of my favorites, with my very own names for them (real name in parentheses).
We'll start with the Glowing Arrow (Arp 148):
The Highway Windshield (NGC 6240)
The Flaming Splinter (NGC 6670):
And finally, I call this one "my new desktop wallpaper:"
I was going to write a whole bunch about this, but I have been beaten to the punch by Universe Today, Bad Astronomy, and Will Gater. I'll have to wake up earlier next time! In the meantime, get all of the pictures from the Hubble Site itself.
More like this
Bob!
We move on to open clusters, in the hope that we may actually understand those, since they are smaller and more tractable for simulations, right?
Right...
Open Clusters
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” -Alan Turing
“We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
NGC 7331 is a spiral galaxy, probably not too dissimilar from our own (except that it lacks a bar), which is relatively nearby. (At a mere 49 million light-years, it's not in our own back yard, but it's just down the block.)