Sparkling Ring by National Geographic

Sparkling Ring

Image courtesy S. Rappaport, CXC/MIT/NASA

When two lovers decide to merge their lives, a shiny ring often comes into the picture. Apparently that's also true for the merging galaxies collectively known as Arp 147. A new composite picture from two NASA telescopes shows a ring of newborn stars decked out with hot-pink black holes that's formed around one of the interacting galaxies.
The collision of a spiral galaxy (right) with an elliptical galaxy produced the wave of star formation, shown in blue in visible-light images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some of the massive stars lived fast and died young, collapsing to form black holes. As the black holes pull in surrounding material, they give off x-rays, captured in pink by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Published February 10, 2011