The Antennae galaxies

Wallpaper Description:

The Antennae galaxies, viewed in the sharpest-yet image of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of their collision, billions of stars will be formed. The two spiral galaxies, about 45 million light-years from our solar system, started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team