The Cartwheel
Galaxy lights up the sky in this composite view assembled by NASA's Galaxy
Evolution Explorer.
This
false-color view is actually a series images taken by four space-based
telescopes at different wavelengths to obtain a more colorful side of the
Cartwheel Galaxy. Ultraviolet observations (appearing blue) by the Galaxy
Evolution Explorer capped a suite of studies that included visible light data
from the Hubble Space Telescope (in green), infrared images by the Spitzer
Space Telescope (in red), as well as X-ray imagery from the Chandra X-ray
Observatory (in purple).
Recent observations
show that concentric rings emanating from the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is
reeling from a collision with a smaller galaxy, are laden with star formation. Observations
used to generate this image, which was released this week during the 207th
meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C., found that the
galaxy is relatively quite in the ultraviolet range.
"Usually a
galaxy is brighter toward the center, but the ultraviolet view indicates the
collision actually smoothed out the interior of the galaxy, concentrating older
stars and dust into the inner regions," astronomer Phil Appleton of the
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "It's
like the calm after the storm of star formation."
While past
observations set the outer limit of the Cartwheel Galaxy as the larger ring
seen here, an even larger ring was detected in the latest round of Galaxy
Evolution Explorer observations. That faint disk - not visible in this view -
means the galaxy is about 2.5 times the size of our own Milky Way.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/P. N. Appleton (Spitzer Science Center/ Caltech).
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