This image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), both installed on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the peculiar galaxy NGC 3256. The galaxy is about 100 million light-years from Earth and is the result of a past galactic merger, which created its distorted appearance. As such, NGC 3256 provides an ideal target to investigate starbursts that have been triggered by galaxy mergers constellaition vela

although it resembles a peaceful rose swirling within the darkness of the cosmos, ngc 3256 is truely the web page of a violent conflict. this distorted galaxy is the relic of a collision between two spiral galaxies, estimated to have occured 500 tens of millions years ago. these days it is nevertheless reeling inside the aftermath of this event.

located about 100 million mild-years away inside the constellation of vela (the sails), ngc 3256 is about the same size as our milky manner and belongs to the hydra-centaurus supercluster. it still bears the marks of its tumultuous beyond in the prolonged luminous tails that sprawl out around the galaxy, idea to have fashioned 500 million years in the past for the duration of the initial encounter among the two galaxies, which nowadays shape ngc 3256. these tails are studded with young blue stars, which were born inside the frantic but fertile collision of fuel and dust.

while two galaxies merger, individual stars rarely collide due to the fact they are separated via such giant distances, but the gasoline and dirt of the galaxies do engage -- with fantastic consequences. the brightness blooming in the centre of ngc 3256 offers away its status as a effective starburst galaxy, host to massive amounts of little one stars born into businesses and clusters. those stars shine maximum brightly in the some distance infrared, making ngc 3256 enormously luminous in this wavelength domain. due to this radiation, it's far categorized as a luminous infrared galaxy.

ngc 3256 has been the situation of lots look at due to its luminosity, its proximity, and its orientation: astronomers study its splendour face-on orientation, that shows the disc in all its splendour. ngc 3256 provides a super goal to research starbursts that have been prompted by using galaxy mergers. it holds specific promise to similarly our understanding of the properties of young megastar clusters in tidal tails.

in addition to being lit up through over a thousand brilliant big name clusters, the central vicinity of ngc 3256 is also home to crisscrossing threads of dark dirt and a big disc of molecular gas spinning round  wonderful nuclei -- the relics of the two unique galaxies. one nucleus is essentially obscured, simplest unveiled in infrared, radio and x-ray wavelengths.

those two initial galaxies have been fuel-rich and had similar hundreds, as they seem to be exerting more or less equal have an effect on on every other. their spiral disks are now not wonderful, and in some hundred million years time, their nuclei can even merge and the two galaxies will in all likelihood turn out to be united as a huge elliptical galaxy.

ngc 3256 become formerly imaged through fewer filters with the aid of the nasa/esa hubble space telescope as a part of a massive series of fifty nine snap shots of merging galaxies, launched for hubble's 18th anniversary on twenty fourth april 2008.