Cosmic Easter Egg and Cosmic Exclamation Point

Photo: NASA/JPL

“With colors that would make Faberge green with envy, the Cartwheel galaxy stands out against a backdrop of other brightly-colored galactic bodies. The Easter egg appearance of this galaxy is due to false colors representing various wavelengths of light — ultraviolet in blue, B-band visible light in green, infrared in red and x-ray radiation in purple. 

The ‘rings’ of this galaxy are the aftermath of a collision between the Cartwheel galaxy and another galaxy about 100 million years ago. The first ripple is the blue outer ring, while the yellow-orange “yolk” of the Easter egg is a combination of visible and infrared light from the second ripple. The neon blob and green spiral in the background are two other galaxies, one of which may have been the one that collided with Cartwheel.“

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Image credit: X-ray NASA/CXC/IfA/D.Sanders

“VV 340, also known as Arp 302, provides a textbook example of colliding galaxies seen in the early stages of their interaction. The edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on galaxy at the bottom of the image is VV 340 South. Millions of years later these two spirals will merge — much like the Milky Way and Andromeda will likely do billions of years from now. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) are shown here along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue). VV 340 is located about 450 million light years from Earth.“

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There are some additional neat astronomy pictures at the below link:

https://www.livescience.com/37291-amazing-astronomy-images.html