A camera originally designed to study dark energy has captured a beautiful image of two interacting galaxies. The two galaxies in this image are part of an interacting pair that have been together for 400 million years. Many new stars are being born as the two are drawn together by gravity.
The barred spiral galaxy on the left of the image is called the bigger one. A dwarf lenticular galaxy is a small type of galaxy that has some properties of a spiral and elliptical galaxy.
You can see the tendrils of dust and gas reaching out from the larger galaxy as the two collide, with the force of gravity stretching out their shapes and creating the star formation seen in the stream of light between them. Eventually, the two will become one universe.
The Pendulum Clock can be seen in the southern hemisphere, but they were imaged at 60 million light-years away. The Dark Energy Survey is a project designed to investigate dark matter.
The project looked at wide fields of space to understand dark energy. Since then, DECam has been used to collect other data.
The mirror of the telescope is 13 feet wide and 4 meters high, and is shaped like a semi-truck.
The starlight is captured by a grid of 62 charge-coupled devices. These CCDs are similar to the sensors found in ordinary digital cameras, but are far more sensitive, and allow the instrument to create detailed images of faint astronomical objects.
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