This is a group
of galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet.
Quintet meaning five, of course.
And you can see them here.
One, two, three, four, five.
Although, it's really just a visual quintet because it turns out that
the galaxy here on the left is a lot closer than the other four.
The other four are at a distance of about 290 million light years away.
And the nearby one is only about 40 million light years away.
You can also see its difference in color and details.
They're still all in our deep universe.
And they make for a very interesting picture.
The ones on the right
are actually gravitationally interacting with each other.
They are feeling each other's pull,
and that's creating structural changes in these galaxies.
You can even see evidence that the spiral structure in these galaxies is becoming
distorted as they feel each other's gravitational tug.
It's creating long tails of stars and star formation between the galaxies.
Because as you have more regions where gas is stirred up and compacted,
that's the recipe for more clumps of gas in
each of these galaxies to collapse and form more stars.
You can see these two are closer in this dance of merging.
And all of this is evidence of the merging process of galaxies
that we now know is very common in the history of our universe.
Galaxies that are close enough to each other will feel each other's
gravitational pull.
They'll come toward each other.
that creates a little dance as they orbit around each other, sometimes
go through each other and they distort each other structure.
So you can see this cosmic dance going on right now
in Stephan's Quintet, and you can see some of the impacts of that.
So we
can see that the galaxies are connected to each other.
Now and they're showing us that merging is an important part
of forming structure in stars and galaxies.
We actually believe
that most galaxies have gone through at least one merger in cosmic history.
We believe our Milky Way has and will again.
So we want to watch this dramatic dance so that we understand how galaxies
have formed and grown over cosmic history, including our own Milky Way.