A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 143. The pair contains the glittery, distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445 at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444 at left.
Astronomers suggest that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of the image. This galaxy is awash in starbirth because it is rich in gas, the fuel that makes stars. However, it hasn’t yet escaped the gravitational clutches of its partner NGC 2444, shown on the left side of the image. The pair is waging a cosmic tug-of-war, which NGC 2444 appears to be winning. The galaxy has pulled gas from NGC 2445, forming the oddball triangle of newly minted stars.
While processing, I noticed that the H-alpha data did not fully cover all the background galaxies to the left. The Hubble processors solved this problem by just cropping out that area. I didn’t want to do that, so I just filled the remain h-alpha data with noise and assumed that any h-alpha emission from the background galaxies would be negligible. That way, I could keep all the fascinating background galaxies for you all to look at!
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All data was taken from the HST proposal #15446, principal investigator J. Dalcanton and #16435, principal investigator C. Britt. More information can be found here: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=15446, https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=16435
Processing:
- Cropped color channels
- Repaired H-alpha channel
- Combined RGB channels
- contiuum subtracted h-alpha channel
- added subtracted h-alpha channel to RGB
- Extracted synth lum
- Deconvoluted synthetic luminance
- Denoised RGB and Luminance
- Stretched lum using GHS
- Stretched RGB using ArcsinH and GHS
- LRGB combination
- Curves transformation
- Set background level to .03
- LHE
- Unsharp mask