Image Credit: ESA, NASA: Acknowledgement: A. Gal-Yam (Weizmann Institute of Science)
In Hubble's latest piece of work, we meet a spiral galaxy found about 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pisces.
It should go without saying that the galaxy, called NGC 7714, has seen better days. In the recent past, a gravitational perturbation completely obliterated its once-spiral structure, leaving oddly-shaped arms and an almost-rectangular central core behind.
The most probable culprit can't be seen in this field of view (it lies just outside of eyeshot), called NGC 7715. It's believed that around 100 million and 200 million years ago, the two simply drifted too close together until they began to exert a mutual gravitational pull.
[box style="0"] As a result, a ring and two long tails of stars have emerged from NGC 7714, creating a bridge between the two galaxies. This bridge acts as a pipeline, funnelling material from NGC 7715 towards its larger companion and feeding bursts of star formation. Most of the star-forming activity is concentrated at the bright galactic centre, although the whole galaxy is sparking new stars.
Astronomers characterise NGC 7714 as a typical Wolf-Rayet starburst galaxy.
This is due to the stars within it; a large number of the new stars are of the Wolf-Rayet type — extremely hot and bright stars that begin their lives with dozens of times the mass of the Sun, but lose most of it very quickly via powerful winds.
This Hubble image is a composite of data capturing a broad range of wavelengths, revealing the correlation of the gas clouds and stars in the galaxy. This new picture not only reveals the intricate structure of NGC 7714, but also shows many other objects that are much further away. These background galaxies resemble faint smudges of light, some of them with spiral forms.
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