                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2022 May 17

                      NGC 1316: After Galaxies Collide
      Image Credit & Copyright: Capture: Greg Turgeon; Processing: Kiko
                                  Fairbairn

   Explanation: Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the
   cause of startling sights like NGC 1316. Investigations indicate that
   NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that started, about 100
   million years ago, to devour a smaller spiral galaxy neighbor, NGC
   1317, just on the upper right. Supporting evidence includes the dark
   dust lanes characteristic of a spiral galaxy, and faint swirls and
   shells of stars and gas visible in this wide and deep image. One thing
   that >remains unexplained is the unusually small globular star
   clusters, seen as faint dots on the image. Most elliptical galaxies
   have more and brighter globular clusters than NGC 1316. Yet the
   observed globulars are too old to have been created by the recent
   spiral collision. One hypothesis is that these globulars survive from
   an even earlier galaxy that was subsumed into NGC 1316. Another
   surprising attribute of NGC 1316, also known as Fornax A, is its giant
   lobes of gas that glow brightly in radio waves.

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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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