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This image of the Cartwheel Galaxy was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. It was reprocessed using the latest techniques. The object was first spotted on wide-field images from the UK Schmidt telescope and then studied in detail using the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
Lying about 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor, the cartwheel shape of this galaxy is the result of a violent galactic collision. A smaller galaxy has passed right through a large disc galaxy and produced shock waves that swept up gas and dust – much like the ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a lake – and sparked regions of intense star formation (appearing blue). The outermost ring of the galaxy, which is 1.5 times the size of our Milky Way, marks the shock wave's leading edge. ESO 350-40 has a mass of about 2.9–4.8 × 10^9 solar masses; its outer ring has a circular velocity of 217 km/s. This object is one of the most dramatic examples of the small class of ring galaxies.
This image was produced after Hubble data was reprocessed using the free open source software FITS Liberator 3, which was developed at the ST-ECF. Careful use of this widely used state-of-the-art tool on the original Hubble observations of the Cartwheel Galaxy has brought out more detail in the image than ever before.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA
Image enhancement: Jean-Baptiste Faure
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