An anomaly from Hubble’s archive — Merging galaxies 2

This is a previously-undiscovered astrophysical anomaly, found in the Hubble Space Telescope’s archive by researchers using a new AI-assisted method. The AI tool allowed them to sift through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just days, turning up rare and anomalous objects like this one.

A small collection of gravitationally interacting galaxies has been found here. Galaxy mergers are relatively common — they were the most abundant type of anomaly found by the researchers — and are easily identified by the distorted shapes of the galaxies’ discs and the tidal tails stretching out between them, caused by the massive gravitational forces slowly pulling each galaxy apart. Eventually the galaxies we see here will be totally disrupted and finally settle into the shape of a single galaxy, most likely an elliptical galaxy.

Read more about this new research here.

[Image description: A small image of several galaxies with distorted shapes. The central galaxy is bluish in colour with a bright centre. It is stretched out into a long, curled bar. At one end sits a reddish galaxy which the bar curves around.]