At first glance, this appears to be just another galaxy collision, but upon closer inspection, you’ll realize that the two galaxies are nowhere near each other. That’s right, the twin galaxies NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B, may both be located in the constellation Virgo, but despite appearing next to each other, hey are at vastly different distances from one another. The former is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away.
Their vast distances mean that the two galaxies are not interacting, and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment, resulting in an optical illusion of sorts. This phenomenon provides astronomers with the opportunity deep dive into the distribution of dust in these galaxies. The dust is the dark tendrils that thread through both NGC 4496A as well as NGC 4496B and it tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars seem dimmer.
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By carefully measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy, astronomers can map the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting ‘dust maps’ help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating these galaxies,” said NASA.
