NGC 4038/4039
The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Corvus. They are currently going through a starburst phase, in which the collision of clouds of gas and dust, with entangled magnetic fields, causes rapid star formation.
The two spiral galaxies began to interact a few hundred million years ago. The Antennae galaxies are one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Many of the faint objects in the image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange patches on the sides of the image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars covered by filaments of dust, which appear brown in the image. The two galaxies have many brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image as a reddish pink.
Imaged on our RiDK 700 at El Sauce, Obstech, Chile
Integration time: 36 hours
Image Processing: Mike Selby