“Butterfly” galaxies begin their fusion journey through space

Release Date:
August 11, 2022 7:00 GMT

Updated Date: August 11, 2022 at 8:15 GMT

The American network “CNN” reported that two galaxies in the infinite space known as “butterfly galaxies” have begun their journey to merge, which may be completed after 500 million light years.

And a new telescope image shows that the two entangled galaxies will eventually merge and meet a fate similar to our own Milky Way.

The “Gemini North” telescope, located atop a mountain in Hawaii in the eastern United States, observed spiral galaxies about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, the network explained in a statement Wednesday.

The network reported that the galaxy pair “NGC 4567” and “NGC 4568”, also known as the “Butterfly Galaxies”, have begun to collide as gravity pulls them together.

“Within 500 million years, the two cosmic systems will merge to form an elliptical galaxy,” the network said, citing a scientific study.

At this early stage, the centers of the two galaxies are now 20,000 light-years apart, and each galaxy maintains the shape of a pinwheel.

As the two galaxies become intertwined, the gravitational forces lead to many events of intense star formation and the original structures of the two galaxies change and distort them.

And, “Over time, the two galaxies dance around each other in progressively smaller and smaller circles… This tight dance pushes up long streams of gas and stars, mixing the two galaxies together like a giant space ball. .”

Over millions of years, this galactic problem could consume or disperse gas and dust to fuel the birth of stars, slowing star formation, the network pointed out.

Observations of other intergalactic collisions and computer modeling have provided astronomers with additional evidence that spiral galaxy mergers form elliptical galaxies, the network reported.

Once the pair merges, the resulting galaxy may look like an elliptical galaxy called M “essier 89”. Once Messier 89 lost the gas needed for star formation, very few star births occurred.