Hubble Spots A Rare Galaxy Duo In The Hare Constellation

NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rare galaxy duo known as IRAS 06076-2139. The two individual galaxies are seen in the Hare constellation.

The two objects were traveling too fast and speeding past each other at over 4 million miles per hour. They are just 20,000 light-years apart. The galaxy duo was seen using the Wide Field Camera 10 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instruments, according to Nation.

Galaxy IRAS 06076-2139 is actually 2 separate galaxies rushing past each other at about 1,243,000 mph or 2mil km/hr!https://t.co/cMsPCMwD2U pic.twitter.com/MMkNZp1vJm

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) May 12, 2017

NASA stated that galactic interactions could be in many forms. The collisions and the mergers of galaxies are not uncommon, too. It is theorized that the Milky Way could collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in 10.5 billion years, as pointed out by Gephardt Daily. NASA also explained that the fate of the Milky Way galaxy should not be alarming. The galaxies are populated by billions of stars, and the distances between the stellar are so massive that hardly any stellar collisions will happen.

Likewise, the researchers also released an image of the Crab Nebula, which was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes as well. They gathered the images of these objects from the various telescopes and came up with the new image of Crab Nebula in detail. This nebula is the remnant of a stellar explosion dated 1,000 years ago. It could be seen on the planet Earth from 6,500 light-years away.

The researchers are from the National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET), Institute of Astronomy and Physics, and the University of Buenos Aires. They used five telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope (visible), Very Large Array (radio), the XMM- Newton (ultraviolet), the Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray).