Explaining the new photo of the spiral galaxies with an intergalactic bridge like you’re 5:
On November 3, the official Twitter account for the European Space Agency’s feed for the Hubble Telescope shared a video of two galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — known as Wild’s Triplet — which is 200 million light-years from Earth. In the video, you can see two swirls of galaxies. They look small, but they’re each a massive collection of billions of stars, their solar system, dust, and gas — like our Milky Way. Between the two galaxies, there’s a cloud-looking ribbon that’s connecting the two, and while it looks like this whole section is all one, it’s not. The ribbon section is an intergalactic bridge called a tidal tail. It’s been seen in space before and is made up of a stream of dust and stars formed due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, the European Space Agency explains. “This observation comes from a project which delves into two galleries of weird and wonderful galaxies: A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations,” the agency writes. “Each collection contains a menagerie of spectacularly peculiar galaxies, including interacting galaxies such as Arp 248 and one- or three-armed spiral galaxies, galaxies with shell-like structures, and a variety of other space oddities.” For more information on the newly released video, be sure to check out the European Space Agency.
