The Hubble Telescope has spotted a creepy “ghostly face” in space just in time for Halloween. The super space telescope took this incredible image of the Arp-Madore 2026-424 (AM 2026-424) system, which is about 704 million light-years from Earth. Scientists say the image appeared as a result of two galaxies colliding, something which happens often, but “this is different from the more common collisions in which small galaxies are gobbled up by their larger neighbors.”
“The crash has pulled and stretched the galaxies’ discs of gas, dust, and stars outward, forming the ring of intense star formation that shapes the ‘nose’ and ‘face’ features of the system. Ring galaxies are rare, and only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood. The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation so that they interact to create the ring, and before long they will have merged completely, hiding their messy past.”
[h/t nypost]
