It's amazing to think of one galaxy. Wrap your noodle around the three stars side by side.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured a stunning scene in an image that was shared with the public on Saturday. The Phoenix constellation has a group of galaxies collectively known as NGC 7764A that are approximately 450 million light-years away from Earth.
The upper right corner of the image shows two of the three galaxies interacting. Their long trails of gas and stars give the impression that they have just been struck at great speed, according to the official write-up. It is thought that the interactions between two galaxies will take as long as half a billion years.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Fermilab (FNAL), Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, European Southern Observatory (ESO); Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
The explainer says that it seems possible that they are.
The trio's picture was taken using a combination of the Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and its Wide Field Camera 3. The systems capture images of objects in deep space.
NASA shared an image earlier in the year that appeared to show a collision between two different planets. NASA said that it was an optical illusion.
The star systems shown in this image are named after them. We reached out to NASA for clarification because the galaxies are not labeled on the image.
