The Wondrous Lives of Galaxies [Slide Show]
Images in a new book by astronomer James Geach shed light on the genesis and destiny of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors
![The Wondrous Lives of Galaxies [Slide Show]](https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/B6EE3933-E89F-486E-A68CC3952BD1B6E7.jpg?w=590&h=393)
The Wondrous Lives of Galaxies [Slide Show]
- At Home in the Milky Way The bright band of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, glows over the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Atacama desert, home of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). We are embedded within a great disk of stars, our cosmic habitat, which can be seen in this long-exposure image that includes a view of the dense, central bulge of the galaxy... Credit: ESO
- A Maelstrom of Stars The heart of the Whirlpool galaxy, a beautiful spiral galaxy oriented face-on to us, reveals the intricate structure of “island universes.” The two spiral arms emanating from the core are laced by thick lanes of dust and peppered with bright blue clusters of young stars and pink-red patches of ionized hydrogen in regions of star formation... Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Regan and B. Whitmore (STScI), R. Chandar (University of Toledo), S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
- Structures in the Spiral Perturbations in the disk of the spiral galaxy NGC 1300 have caused some stars’ orbits to become very elongated, forming a spoke-like bar structure and helping to transport material from the disk to the galactic center... Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), S. Smartt (Institute of Astronomy) and D. Richstone (U. Michigan)
- An Intergalactic Pileup This is Stephan’s Quintet, a group of galaxies discovered by Édouard Stephan in the 19th century. The bluer galaxy on the lower left is not associated with the group, but the three redder galaxies are all tied together by gravity... Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
- Ghostly Interactions In this image of the spiral galaxy NGC 4911 in the Coma cluster of galaxies, a faint, ghostly stellar emission in the far outskirts of the spiral arms can be seen around the bright central spiral... Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), D. Carter (Liverpool John Moores University) and the Coma HST ACS Treasury Team
- Caught by the Tail These two interacting galaxies, dubbed “The Mice,” are destined to coalesce into a single merged galaxy in the future. Most striking are the long blue tidal “tails” of stars, ripped from the galaxies by gravitational forces during the interaction... Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team and ESA
- The End of the Road This object, NGC 1132, beautifully illustrates the smooth, unblemished, spheroidal morphology of massive and ancient elliptical galaxies. Formed from galactic mergers that helped exhaust most of their star-forming gas, ellipticals now create very few new stars... Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia) and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee
- Einstein’s Telescopes Galaxy clusters such as this one, called Abell 1689, are among the most massive structures in the universe, containing thousands of galaxies. Abell 1689 beautifully reveals the signature of the gravitational warping of space-time predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity: the bluish arcs of light are distorted images of more distant galaxies, magnified by the “gravitational lensing” of the cluster’s dense, massive core... Credit: NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), G.Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA
- The Pillars of Hercules In this composite image the radio galaxy Hercules A is revealed in all its glory. The central elliptical galaxy contains an active supermassive black hole, which is feeding by swallowing up gas, dust and stars... Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O’Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
- Galaxies Like Grains of Sand This is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field from 2004, a window onto the very distant universe even deeper than the original Hubble Deep Field from 1995. Nearly every point of light in this picture is a galaxy, and the most distant ones sent their light to us when the universe was only half a billion years old... Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team
