The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left. In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy’s normal fried-egg appearance. This sort of “tug of war” between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other’s gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike. In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.
By using five color channels spanning near-infrared, visible, and ultraviolet, I was able to reveal not only intense star forming regions (bright nodes of blue) and stars in the dust lanes, but also fainter stellar disruptions (shown on the bottom right).
Image:
Details:
All data was taken from the HST proposal # 15615, principal investigator P.Sell. More information can be found here: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=15615
Processing:
- Cropped color channels
- Combined RGB channels
- 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