Tangled galaxies

Previously the Hubble Picture of the Week series has featured a jewel in the queen’s hair — a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, named for the hair of the historical Egyptian queen. However, that galaxy is only one of many known in this constellation. This week’s new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts the cosmic tangle that is MCG+05-31-045, a pair of interacting galaxies located 390 million light-years away and a part of the so-called Coma galaxy cluster.

The Coma cluster is a particularly rich cluster and contains over a thousand known galaxies. Several can be easily seen with amateur telescopes. Most of them are elliptical galaxies, and that’s typical of a dense galaxy cluster like the Coma cluster: many elliptical galaxies are formed in close encounters between galaxies that stir them up, or even collisions that rip them apart. While the stars in the interacting galaxies can stay together, the gas in the galaxies is a different story — it’s twisted and compressed by gravitational forces, and rapidly used up to form new stars. When the hot, massive, blue stars die, there is little gas left to replace them with new generations of young stars. For interacting spiral galaxies, the regular orbits that produce their striking spiral arms are also disrupted. Whether through mergers or simple near misses, the result is a galaxy almost devoid of gas, with ageing stars orbiting in uncoordinated circles: an elliptical galaxy.

It’s very likely that a similar fate will befall MCG+05-31-045. As the smaller spiral galaxy is torn up and integrated into the larger galaxy, many new stars will form, and the hot, blue ones will quickly burn out, leaving cooler, redder stars behind in an elliptical galaxy much like the others in the Coma cluster. But this process won’t be complete for many millions of years — until then, Queen Berenice II will have to suffer the knots in her hair!

[Image Description: In the centre is a large, oval-shaped galaxy, with a shining, ringed core. Left of its centre is a second, smaller galaxy with two spiral arms. The pair of galaxies are close enough that they appear to be merging: a tail of material with a few glowing spots connects from one of the smaller galaxy’s spiral arms to the larger galaxy. Both are surrounded in a faint halo. Several stars can be seen around the pair.]

Links

• Pan of MCG+05-31-045