By Xinhai

(Clearwisdom.net) After more than three years of inactivity, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of breathtaking views of galaxies. NASA released some of the pictures in early June. One of the pictures showed a tumultuous collision between four galaxies, called IRAS 19297-0406, located 1 billion light-years from Earth. The galactic collision is creating a torrent of new stars. The large amount of dust generated by the collision is what produces the brilliant infrared glow.

This class of galaxies, known as ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs), carries bizarre shapes and glows fiercely in the infrared spectrum, appearing 100 times brighter than our Milky Way. Astronomers believe that the extremely strong infrared emission is related to a firestorm of star birth triggered by the collisions. The emission from the newborn stars is absorbed by the surrounding dust, which gives off the high-intensity infrared emission.

At present, IRAS 19297-0406 is generating 200 new Sun-like stars every year -- about 100 times more stars than our Milky Way creates. The colliding galaxies are so close together that they will eventually fall into each other and form one massive galaxy.

Astronomers previously thought only pairs of galaxies were interacting in ULIRGs. But Hubble pictures show a surprising amount of complexity and structure that astronomer Kirk Borne of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and other collaborators interpret as collisions of multiple galaxies.

Using Hubble to conduct a three-year survey of 123 ULIRGs within 3 billion light-years of Earth, Borne found that 30% of them show strong visual evidence for multiple mergers, where astronomers previously thought only two galaxies were interacting.

"We are seeing the final stage of the hierarchical evolution of the universe, where small fragments coalesce to build ever bigger objects," says Borne. "We see matter ripped out of galaxies in the form of long tails of stars, and matter contracting in the form of multiple nuclei crowded together. In some we see a 'nest' of galaxies where they all coalesce."

These results provided a snapshot of what conditions were like in the early universe, when galaxy collisions were commonplace. Falun Dafa is now spreading throughout the human world, and heaven and earth must change accordingly. Especially in the present period of time, the universe that we are able to observe is undergoing an unprecedented, gigantic change. Discoveries of newborn galaxies appear one after another. These phenomena indicate that the new cosmos is now replacing the old one on an enormous scale. This may lead to the conclusion that our universe is now returning to a state of birth.

References:

http://www.vialattea.net/hubble/1999/9945.htm
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/2002/13/pr-photos.html
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1999/45/pr.html

Posting date: 6/28/2002
Original article date: 6/28/2002
Category: Scientific Findings
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2002/6/24/32252.html

 Yearly Archive  Printer Version