The beauty and wonders of our planet’s night sky cloaks a violent, ever-changing universe of life, death, and mayhem –“with firestorms of star birth, dying stars rattling the very fabric of space in titanic explosions,” observes Hubble scientists. “Death-star-like beams of energy blasting out of overfed black holes at nearly the speed of light”, they say, “Hubble has seen them all.” A universe of which the Milky Way is one of 150 billion galaxies. A strange universe, hinted Stephen Hawking. “of shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.”
The Bright Cores of a Galaxy
Each “eye” in this piercing image, said Julianne Dalcanton , a University of Washington professor of astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy, led the team that captured the image, “is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.”