'Dancing galaxies' snapped by NASA's Hubble Telescope leaves netizens in awe; See pic

NASA has gifted yet another eye candy to astronomy geeks as it shared a never seen before galactic dance between two galaxies. Captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the photograph shared by the agency on their official Instagram handle has already mesmerised the viewers. Take a look at the ‘delicate’ dance between the two starry galaxies.

Although the two galaxies have their separate names, they also go by a common name of Arp 91 owing to their proximity to each other. NASA said that the lower galaxy, which looks like a bright spot, is NGC 5953, and the oval-shaped galaxy to the upper right is NGC 5954. In reality, both of them are spiral galaxies, but their shapes appear very different because of their orientation with respect to Earth, as per NASA. However, despite the galaxies appearing to tango, they are located more than 100 million light-years from Earth.

Captioning their Instagram post, the agency explained that the lower galaxy, NGC 5953, clearly tugs at the galaxy on the upper right, which appears to extend one spiral arm downward. Besides, their shapes appear strange due to their orientation in respect to Earth but are classified as spiral. The scientists further revealed that collision between such galaxies leads to the formation of elliptical galaxies, but stated that we can expect this dance to continue for our lifetime as galaxy collisions often take place over hundreds of millions of years.

NASA accredited the reason for their interaction to the immense gravitational attraction between them, but added that such gravitational interactions are common and are an important part of galactic evolution. Earlier, the Hubble telescope had won the internet for a spectacular visualisation video showing four of Saturn's massive constellation of 82 moons parading across the face of the planet.

In the Instagram post, NASA pointed out the large orange moon Titan and icy Mimas of Saturn on the right, and the icy moons Enceladus and Dione on the far left. It even added the song “Time Will Tell" in the background to make the post even more heartfelt and epic. The post was captioned, "Celebrate #InternationalMusicDay by exploring sonification. Scientists interpret data from images by representing them in sound, creating some beautiful cosmic music!"

Image: NASA