Warped galaxy
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, ESO 510-G13, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars.
The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. This image shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs obtained at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. ESO 510-G13 lies in the southern constellation Hydra, roughly 150 million light-years from Earth.
Details of the structure of ESO 510-G13 are visible because the interstellar dust clouds that trace its disk are silhouetted from behind by light from the galaxy's bright, smooth central bulge.
The strong warping of the disk indicates that ESO 510-G13 has recently undergone a collision with a nearby galaxy and is in the process of swallowing it. Gravitational forces distort the structures of the galaxies as their stars, gas, and dust merge together in a process that takes millions of years. Eventually the disturbances will die out, and ESO 510-G13 will become a normal-appearing single galaxy.
In the outer regions of ESO 510-G13, especially on the right-hand side of the image, we see that the twisted disk contains not only dark dust, but also bright clouds of blue stars. This shows that hot, young stars are being formed in the disk. Astronomers believe that the formation of new stars may be triggered by collisions between galaxies, as their interstellar clouds smash together and are compressed.
Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) was used to observe ESO 510-G13 in April 2001. Pictures obtained through blue, green, and red filters were combined to make this color-composite image, which emphasizes the contrast between the dusty spiral arms, the bright bulge, and the blue star-forming regions.
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This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag. |
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ESO 510-G13ESO 510-G13 ist eine etwa 150 Millionen Lichtjahre entfernte Spiralgalaxie im Sternbild Wasserschlange. Ihre in Kantenlage zu sehende Staubscheibe ist sehr auffällig verbogen, was darauf hindeutet, dass sie mit einer anderen Galaxie in Wechselwirkung stand. Besonders durch die in der Scheibe liegenden Dunkelwolken, die sich vor den Sternen der ausgedehnten, hellen Bulge befinden, wird diese Struktur hervorgehoben. Diese auffällige Warp genannte Verbiegung der Scheibe wurde zuerst von der Europäischen Südsternwarte in Chile festgestellt und ist recht ungewöhnlich, da diese normalerweise nicht in den sternreichen inneren galaktischen Scheibe auftritt, sondern in sternarmen aus neutralem Wasserstoff bestehenden Außenbereichen. Die genaue Ursache für die stark verbogene Scheibe von ESO 510-G13 ist nicht bekannt. Sie könnte entweder durch den Vorbeiflug einer gleich großen Galaxie entstanden oder der Überrest der Verschmelzung mit einer kleinen Galaxie sein. .. weiterlesen