NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of two spiral galaxies, known collectively as Arp 303. They are individually called IC 563 (bottom) and IC 564 (top) at altitudes of over 275 million. Light years in the direction of the constellation Sextans.
Image using data from two separate Hubble observations of Arp 303.
The first observation used data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study the star-forming regions of this pair in light. Luminous infrared galaxies such as IC 563 and IC 564 are very bright at wavelengths of infrared light, and they have many bright star-forming regions.
For a second look, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was used to quickly look at the bright and exciting galaxies in the sky. These new observations fill gaps in the Hubble collection as they search for promising candidates that Hubble, the James Webb Telescope and other telescopes can study further.
Stars are formed from clouds of dust and gas scattered throughout most galaxies. The turbulence inside these clouds gives rise to “nodes” of sufficient mass that the gas and dust begin to collapse under their own gravity. As soon as these clouds break, matter starts heating up at their centers.
This hot core at the center of the collapsing cloud is called a protostar and will eventually become a star. Computer models of star formation predict that the collapsing cloud of gas and dust may split into two or three droplets. This may explain why most stars in the Milky Way are clustered together or in clusters of several stars.