Gemini South telescope captures billion-year-old aftermath of galaxy collision

Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have captured the billion-year-old aftermath of a spiral galaxy collision, revealing vast swirling bands of interstellar dust and gas that resemble freshly spun cotton candy as they wrap around the merging cores of the progenitor galaxies.

The galaxy in question is NGC 7727, a peculiar galaxy located about 90 million light-years from our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation of Aquarius. At the heart of this chaotic interaction, is a pair of supermassive black holes.

The monster black holes, one measuring 154 million solar masses and the other 6.3 million solar masses, are approximately 1600 light-years apart and are the nearest pair of supermassive black holes to Earth ever recorded. The duo is expected to eventually merge into one in about 250 million years to form an even more massive black hole.

"Because the galaxy is still reeling from the impact, most of the tendrils we see are ablaze with bright young stars and active stellar nurseries. In fact, about 23 objects found in this system are considered candidates for young globular clusters. These collections of stars often form in areas where star formation is higher than usual and are especially common in interacting galaxies as we see here," NOIRLab wrote in a post.

Once the dust settles, NGC 7727 will also eventually become an elliptical galaxy composed of older stars and very little star formation. This may be the fate of our Milky Way and its neighbour - the Andromeda Galaxy - when they fuse together in billions of years from now.

The above image was captured using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) mounted on Gemini South - one of the two telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory operated by NSF's NOIRLab. The Gemini Observatory consists of twin 8.1-meter diameter optical/infrared telescopes located on two of the best-observing sites on the planet, with both telescopes designed to excel in a wide variety of optical and infrared capabilities.