April 11, 2002
Light takes eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. It took the universe 13.8 billion years to make you.
Antennae Galaxies in Near-Infrared
Birthday · April 11, 2002
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APOD published April 11, 2002. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What happens when galaxies collide? One of the best studied examples of the jumble of star clusters, gas, and dust clouds produced by such a cosmic train wreck is the interacting galaxy pair NGC 4038 / NGC 4039, the Antennae Galaxies, only sixty million light-years away. In visible light images, long, luminous tendrils of material seem to reach out from the galactic wreckage, lending the entwined pair an insect-like appearance. But this penetrating view from the new Wide-field InfraRed Camera (WIRC) attached to the Palomar Observatory's 200 inch Hale telescope shows, in false-color, details of some otherwise hidden features. The large central nuclei of the two original galaxies dominate the near-infrared scene speckled with other bright sources which are themselves giant, newly formed star clusters. Remarkably the northern (topmost) nucleus, obscured in optical images, is also revealed here to have a barred, mini-spiral structure reminiscent of many "single" spiral galaxies.