Hubble Captures Overlapping Galaxies

Keeping on the theme of galaxies today, Hubble Space Telescope just released this lovely image of two overlapping galaxies. Seeing such alignments like this is somewhat rare. Even though there are millions and millions of galaxies in the universe, they don’t always lie at overlapping angles from our point of view.

The large background galaxy is about 780 million light-years away and the smaller one in front of it is obviously a bit closer. Astronomers are not sure how far apart these galaxies are, but it doesn’t appear that they are interacting at the moment.

If you look closely at the smaller one, you can see dark dusty areas along the outer edges — they’re highlighted against the bright core region of the larger galaxy. This is also pretty rare to see dust this far out from the visible “edge.”

The stars you see all around these two galaxies are part of another galaxy called NGC 253, which is in the constellation Sculptor (in the southern hemisphere). So, we’re looking the edge of one galaxy to see two much more distant spirals.  Very, very cool!

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