The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a fascinating image distant galaxies in the process of merging. The three galaxies IC 2431, located 681 million light-years away from Earth, are swirling into each other with a thick cloud of dust obscuring the center of the image. Light from a background galaxy was seen piercing through the outer parts.
The image was found by Galaxy Zoo citizen science project, in which more than 100,000 volunteers sift through 900,000 unexamined galaxies as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Weird and interesting finds are then given to astronomers to take closer looks.
The Galaxy Zoo shows how powerful a crowdsourced project could be: what would have been years of work for professional astronomers was achieved in just 175 days.
Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt