Cette image peut avoir des imperfections car il s’agit d’une image historique ou de reportage.
False-color image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals hidden populations of newborn stars at the heart of the colliding "Antennae" galaxies. These two galaxies, known individually as NGC 4038 and 4039, are located around 68 million light-years away and have been merging together for about the last 800 million years. The image was taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera and is a combination of infrared light with wavelengths ranging from 3.6 microns (shown in blue), to 4.5 microns (green), to 5.8-8.0 microns (red). The dust emission (red) is by far the strongest feature in this image. Starlight was systematically subtracted from the longer wavelength data (red) to enhance dust features. The two nuclei, or centers, of the merging galaxies show up as white areas, one above the other. The brightest clouds of forming stars lie in the overlap region between and left of the nuclei. Observations of such "interacting" galaxies, combined with computer models of these collisions, show that the galaxies often become forever bound to one another, eventually merging into a single, spheroidal-shaped galaxy, on time scales comparable to geologic changes on Earth. This image was taken on December 24, 2003.
