Hubble Telescope

NASA has just released a new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing what it looked like moments before galactic clusters, cosmic clusters that consist of many galaxies held together by gravity smashed into each other. The result of this cosmic collision of galaxy clusters was the formation of a new massive structure called Max J0 416.1-2403, or simply Max J0 416, that lies roughly 4.3 billion light years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. Pictures of galactic clusters sometimes don't look real, because every single one of the tiny, stereotypically spiraled disks in the image above looks an awful lot like they were just photoshopped haphazardly onto a black background. But these images are completely real and also incredible, because each one of those galaxies contains billions of stars and countless planets, just like our own Milky Way contains the planets and the stars of our solar system. To create the image above, which the team is calling the Cosmic Kaleidoscope, researchers combine data captured by three different telescopes set to capture individual parts of the sky. As the team explains, the image of the cluster combines data from three different telescopes, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showing the galaxy and stars, the NASA/Sandra X-ray Observatory, diffused emission in blue, and the NRAO/Jansky, very large array, diffused emission in pink. Each telescope shows a different element of the cluster, allowing astronomers to study MAX J0416 in detail.