NASA recently published an interesting image, showing three beautiful galaxies, which seem somewhat overlapped, although their distances are perhaps significantly different. This triple galactic system is technically known as Arp 274, since they are the 274th entry of the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by American astronomer Halton Arp. The image was acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a sophisticated observatory, exploring the universe from Earth orbit.
The three galaxies are spiral, but the galaxy to the left is more compact. Many new stars are being born in the right and left galaxies. This is indicated by the bright glowing patches, where the stars are forming, within the galaxies.
Arp 274 lies about 400 million light-years away from Earth, and is visible in the sky among the stars of the zodiacal constellation Virgo.
Hubble imaged Arp 274 in April 2009, applying a combination of filters. The colors in this image reveal the intrinsic colors of the various stellar populations that comprise the three galaxies. The cores of the galaxies are yellowish, as they consist of reddish old stars. The bluish spiral arms are populated by hot young blue stars. They also contain pinkish knots, which are large glowing gas clouds, and dark clouds of cosmic dust, visible in silhouette, against starlight. The two bright stars at right belong to our Galaxy, the Milky Way.
References
NASA
www.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia