If the previous images of merging galaxies looked rather gentle then this is anything but. Several hundred million years ago, these galaxies were both spirals, rather similar to our own. Now, as the first image shows, they are almost totally disrupted with clumps of new stars ignited by the gravitational interaction.
The second image has been processed to over-expose the galactic cores and show the features that give this pair of galaxies their common name. Two gravity waves have produced long streams of stars, dust and gas stripped from the merging galaxies.
For astonomers wanting to study galactic interaction this pair present an ideal target as they’re are close neighbours at 45 million light years distance.
These images were produced on GRAS-15 and are a combination of 10x 300 second luminance frames binned at 1×1 and 6 each of red, green and blue filtered images binned at 2×2.