Friday, May 3, 2013

Gigantic Hot Gas Cloud Sheaths Colliding Galaxies

NGC 6240: Gigantic Hot Gas Cloud Sheaths Colliding Galaxies:
Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/SAO/E.Nardini et al); Optical (NASA/STScI)
Gigantic Hot Gas Cloud Sheaths Colliding Galaxies
Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/SAO/E.Nardini et al); Optical (NASA/STScI)
Looking almost like a cosmic hyacinth, this image is anything but a cool, Spring flower… it’s a portrait of an enormous gas cloud radiating at more than seven million degrees Kelvin and enveloping two merging spiral galaxies. This combined image glows in purple from the Chandra X-ray information and is embellished with optical sets from the Hubble Space Telescope. It flows across 300,000 light years of space and contains the mass of ten billion Suns. Where did it come from? Researchers theorize it was caused by a rush of star formation which may have lasted as long as 200 million years. (...)
Read the rest of NGC 6240: Gigantic Hot Gas Cloud Sheaths Colliding Galaxies (396 words)

© tammy for Universe Today, 2013. |
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