By ESA/Hubble
February 13, 2022
Hubble Space Telescope image of IC 2431, which seems a triple galaxy merger in development, along with a troubled mixture of star development and tidal distortions triggered by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. Credit: ESA/Hubble & & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL, DECam, CTIO, NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS, Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
The mass of dust and intense swirls of stars in this image are the far-off galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has actually caught what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, in addition to a turbulent mix of star formation and tidal distortions triggered by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. The center of this image is obscured by a thick cloud of dust– though light from a background galaxy can be seen piercing its outer extremities..
This image is from a series of Hubble observations investigating wonderful and weird galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo person science project. Using Hubbles powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), astronomers took a more detailed look at a few of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers had identified.
The initial Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out, and depend on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. The job attained what would have been years of work for an expert astronomer in only 175 days, and has actually caused a constant stream of similar huge citizen science projects.
Later on Galaxy Zoo projects have consisted of the biggest ever research studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, along with the discovery of completely new types of compact star-forming galaxies.