The Porpoise Galaxy from Hubble

What’s occurring to this spiral galaxy? Merely just a few hundred million years within the past, NGC 2936, the upper of the 2 orderly galaxies shown, used to be likely a conventional spiral galaxy — spinning, increasing stars — and minding its like enterprise. But then it bought too shut to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 below and took a dive. Dubbed the Porpoise galaxy for its iconic shape, NGC 2936 is no longer handiest being deflected but moreover being distorted by the shut gravitational interaction. A burst of young blue stars forms the nose of the porpoise toward the supreme of the upper galaxy, while the center of the spiral looks as an watch. Alternatively, the galaxy pair, together identified as Arp 142, peep to some like a penguin conserving an egg. Both intention, intricate darkish mud lanes and intriguing blue big title streams path the nervous galaxy to the lower objective staunch. The featured re-processed image displaying Arp 142 in unheard of element used to be taken by the Hubble Dwelling telescope final year. Arp 142 lies about 300 million light years away toward the constellation, coincidently, of the Water Snake (Hydra). In a thousand million years or so the 2 galaxies will likely merge into one higher galaxy.