Photo credit: ESA/Hubble | NASA | M. West
Just like our Milky Way and Andromeda, the two galaxies you see here are on a collision course, as captured by NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 3558 (lower left) and LEDA 83465 (upper right) are both located around 450 million light-years from Earth, separated from each another by a distance of roughly 150,000 light-years.
These galaxies belong to the chaotic galaxy cluster known as Abell 1185. Sometimes, these galactic interactions have caused galaxies to be torn apart completely. NGC 3558 has not suffered this fate, as it retained its integrity as both an elliptical galaxy and a low-ionization nuclear emission-line region, also known as LINER.
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LINERs are a particular type of galactic nucleus or core, and are distinguished by the chemical fingerprints written into the light that they emit. As their name suggests, LINERs emit light which suggests that many of the atoms and molecules within these galactic cores have either been weakly ionised or not ionised at all. Ionisation is the process by which atoms or molecules lose or gain electrons,” said the ESA.
