Hubble has photographed two colliding galaxies, creating a set of stars called Arp 143, an unprecedented star-making frenzy. This collision has given rise to a strange triangle shape. The pair of galaxies contains the extremely bright spiral NGC 2445, described by NASA as “twinkling”, on the right, and its much less conspicuous companion NGC 2444 on the left.
“Simulations show that head-on collisions between two galaxies are a way to create rings of new stars,” says astronomer Julianne Dalcanton of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle.
