Scientists from the Gemini North Observatory, which includes 8-meter telescopes in the US state of Hawaii, managed to reach an amazing picture of a collision that occurred between two huge spiral galaxies, located in the constellation Virgo or “Virgo” in the zodiac, more than 60 million light-years from Earth, so that it appeared The early stages of the Great Merger in the form of a beautiful cosmic butterfly fascinated scientists and ordinary people.
It is the amazing nature of the appearance of the universe, different from day after day, to observatories, telescopes and roving satellites for observation from space, astonishing scientists and ordinary people, from which the galaxy NGC 4568 appeared, which is in an early state of an amazing merger with the galaxy NGC 4567 associated with it by a relationship within the mutual gravitational field, so that the shapes continued The original spiral of both galaxies is evident in the image published by “Al Arabiya.net” below, quoting what was stated in a statement published and issued by NOIRLab, which is known as the laboratory operating the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii.
As the collision and slow merger continues, the arm-like patterns will change to the point where the two galaxies lose their spiral structures, “as the gravitational struggle leads to intense bursts of star formation, eventually ending in the emergence of a new elliptical galaxy approximately 500 million years later,” the statement said.
The expected event after that distant time, provides a new picture for scientists, in addition to a “peek” of what will happen when the “Milky Way” galaxy collides after 5 billion years with our closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy or “Andromeda” that can be seen with the naked eye, with It is more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.
The image of the “butterfly” produced by the Gemini North Observatory, from the data it collected in 2020, shows a supernova, which resulted from a bright cosmic explosion of a huge star they named SN 2020fqv when they first observed it two years ago, which appears in the image as a bright spot located in the middle of one of the spiral arms of one of the two galaxies. . After the merger, it is possible that a galaxy similar to the older neighbor of the two galaxies, Messier 89 also in “Virgo” and known to be old and now has only minimal formation of low-mass stars.