Elliptical Galaxy

 

Today we are looking at an image of a cosmic tangle! An interacting pair of galaxies that are located about 390 million light years away in the Coma Galaxy Cluster

The Coma Cluster houses over a thousand known Galaxies, which several of them can be seen by amateur astronomers with their backyard telescopes. Most of the galaxies within the Coma cluster are elliptical galaxies which form through the close encounters between the galaxies which stir them up and sometimes they collide and get ripped apart. The stars within these interactive galaxies stay together, however their gas gets twisted  and used up which create new stars. As the Spiral galaxies interact gravity gets disrupted and as you can guess disrupts their regular orbits which often produce amazing spiral arms. Through this tangled encounter that leaves galaxies with little gas and older aging stars that have no coordinated orbital circles elliptical galaxies are formed.


 

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