For those of you who don't know what this picture is of, it is a edge-on picture of a galaxy. This beautiful reddish galaxy is called the Hamburger Galaxy!
Can you see it? It kind of looks like a burnt burger...
Anyways... The more scientific name for this galaxy is NGC 3628. This galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and the tail (the dust clouds surrounding it including the dust coming out on the left side of the galaxy) stretches to about 300,000 light-years. That just makes you wonder how far away was this photo really taken... And even more, how small you really are. This spiral galaxy neighbors 2 other large spiral galaxies M65 and M66 in a grouping called the Leo Triplet. The tidal tail that you see on the left side of the galaxy is due to the gravitational interaction these three galaxies have faced with each other. Because these objects are so big, the amount of gravity that they have corresponds making the gravitational pull very intense. Anyways, the Hamburger Galaxy is the more fainter of the three but it is nevertheless impressive. The cloud that you see surrounding the galaxy, called the halo, is made up of dust and globular clusters which tend to be hundreds of thousands of stars that are up to 13 BILLION years of age! That is even before our own galaxy was even formed!
Pretty crazy things can happen up in space....
No comments:
Post a Comment