Stephan's Quintet

This is another beautiful example of a smaller group of galaxies: HCG 92. The famous Stephan's Quintet consists of five galaxies of which four form a dense group. The galaxy to the bottom left is a foreground galaxy not connected with the others. The four galaxies are in an early phase of colliding with each other; tidal tails and heavy star formation are the first signs of the upcoming collision. It is most likely that in the next hundreds of millions of years all four galaxies will merge together to form a huge elliptical galaxy.

All text and articles published by Sun.org are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.