The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an impressive picture of three galaxies close together. The two of them seem to interact and together take the form of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. The group of galaxies is known as NGC 7764A and is located about 425 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix.
The image shows long wisps of stars and gas beginning to extend from the two galaxies in the upper right. As if they were “both hit very quickly” and “were thrown into disarray by a bowling-ball-like galaxy in the lower left,” NASA itself captioned the photo. In fact, interactions between galaxies occur over an enormous period of time, estimated at half a billion years, and rarely collide head-on.
The two galaxies on the right seem to interact, but it is unclear if the third galaxy is interacting with the other two. This does not seem out of the question, since they are relatively close to each other in space.
Remarkably, the two interacting galaxies appear to make up the famous spaceship USS Enterprise from the Star Trek TV series, seen from our solar system anyway.
The image was created thanks to two powerful cameras specially designed for capturing high-resolution images of objects in space.
Volledige fotocredit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, US 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; Acknowledgments: c. Schmidt
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