By ESA/Hubble
October 17, 2021
Hubble Space Telescope picture of Arp 86, a peculiar set of communicating galaxies which lies roughly 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, Dark Energy Survey, J. Dalcanton
Arp 86 is made up of the 2 galaxies NGC 7752 and NGC 7753– NGC 7753 is the big spiral galaxy dominating this image, and NGC 7752 is its smaller buddy. The diminutive buddy galaxy almost appears to be connected to NGC 7753, and it is this peculiarity that has made the classification “Arp 86”– symbolizing that the galaxy set appears in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies assembled by the astronomer Halton Arp in 1966.
Hubble observed Arp 86 as part of a bigger effort to comprehend the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas in which they form. Hubble gazed into star clusters and clouds of gas and dust in a range of environments dotted throughout nearby galaxies. Combined with measurements from ALMA, a gigantic radio telescope perched high in the Chilean Andes, these Hubble observations offer a bonanza of information for astronomers working to comprehend how stars are born.
These observations also helped plant the seeds of future research study with an approaching area telescope, the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This telescope, due to launch later this year, will study star formation in dirty areas such as the galaxies of Arp 86.
