Two massive lenticular galaxies, NGC 2292 and NGC 2293, approached one another too closely in the distant past, gravity causing them to affect each other and slowly merge into one giant galaxy.
This unusual celestial object, as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is actually a combination of two lenticular galaxies, NGC 2292 and NGC 2293. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / W. Keel, University of Alabama.
NGC 2292 and NGC 2293 are located about 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major.
Both galaxies were discovered by the English astronomer John Herschel on January 20, 1835.
The pair belongs to a galaxy group known as LGG 138; other members of the group are NGC 2280, NGC 2295, ESO 490-G010, and ESO 490-G045.
“If you mix two fried eggs together, you get something resembling scrambled eggs. The same goes for galaxy collisions throughout the Universe,” Hubble astronomers said.
“They lose their flattened spiral disk and the stars are scrambled into a football-shaped volume of space, forming an elliptical galaxy.”
“But this interacting pair is a very rare example of what may turn out to result in a bigger fried egg — the construction of a giant spiral galaxy.”
“It may depend on the specific trajectory the colliding galaxy pair is following.”
“The encounter scenario must be rare, because there is only a handful of other examples in the Universe.”
The NGC 2292/2293 pair is similar to objects tagged by the citizen-science project Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers go hunting for oddball-looking galaxies.
University of Alabama astronomer William Keel included several of these in the Gems of the Galaxy Zoos program, which is observing several kinds of rare galaxies during short gaps between other scheduled Hubble observations.
“The ultimate destiny for this pair will be to merge into a giant luminous spiral galaxy like UGC 2885, Rubin’s Galaxy, which is over twice the diameter of our Milky Way,” Professor Keel said.
