Milky Way over French Alp Hoodoos

Real castles are not this old. The background galaxy is older. The rock spires are millions of years old and look a bit like an alien castle. Hoodoos are rare and occur when dense rocks slow the erosion of softer rock underneath. The hoodoos in the French Alps are called "demoiselles Coiff", which means " Ladies with Hairdos" in English. The central disk of our own Milky Way galaxy contains stars that are billions of years old. Behind the hoodoos, you can see the Cygnus sky region, which is rich in dusty dark clouds and red glowing nebulas. The foreground was captured during the evening blue hour while the background was taken later that night.

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Explanation: Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of startling sights like NGC 1316. Investigations indicate that NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that started, about 100 million years ago, to devour a smaller spiral galaxy neighbor, NGC 1317, just on the upper right. Supporting evidence includes the dark dust lanes characteristic of a spiral galaxy, and faint swirls and shells of stars and gas visible in this wide and deep image. One thing that >remains unexplained is the unusually small globular star clusters, seen as faint dots on the image. Most elliptical galaxies have more and brighter globular clusters than NGC 1316. Yet the observed globulars are too old to have been created by the recent spiral collision. One hypothesis is that these globulars survive from an even earlier galaxy that was subsumed into NGC 1316. Another surprising attribute of NGC 1316, also known as Fornax A, is its giant lobes of gas that glow brightly in radio waves.