Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC October 21, 1997

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Tammy Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5566)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 97-237

HUBBLE REVEALS STELLAR FIREWORKS

ACCOMPANYING GALAXY COLLISIONS

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered over 1,000

bright, young star clusters bursting to life in a brief, intense,
brilliant "fireworks show" at the heart of a pair of colliding
galaxies.

"The sheer number of these young star clusters is amazing,"

said Dr. Brad Whitmore of the Space Telescope Science Institute,
Baltimore, MD. "The discovery will help us put together a
chronological sequence of how colliding galaxies evolve. This
will help us address one of the fundamental questions in
astronomy: why some galaxies are spirals while others are
elliptical in shape."

"These spectacular images are helping us understand how

globular star clusters formed from giant hydrogen clouds in
space," added Dr. Francois Schweizer of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington, Washington, DC. "This galaxy is an excellent
laboratory for studying the formation of stars and star clusters
since it is the nearest and youngest example of a pair of
colliding galaxies."

By probing The Antennae galaxies (called The Antennae

because a pair of long tails of stars formed by the encounter
resembles an insect's antennae) and some of the other nearby
galactic-scale collisions, Hubble is coming up with a variety of
surprises:

* Globular star clusters are not necessarily relics of

the earliest generations of stars formed in a galaxy, as once
commonly thought, but also may provide fossil records of more
recent collisions.

* The "seeds" for star clusters appear to be huge clouds

(tens of light years across) of cold hydrogen gas, called giant
molecular clouds, which are squeezed by surrounding hot gas heated
during the collision and then collapse under their own gravity.
Like a string of firecrackers being ignited by the collision,
these reservoirs of gas light up in a great burst of star
formation.

* The ages of the resulting clusters provide a clock for

estimating the age of a collision. This offers an unprecedented
opportunity for understanding, step-by-step, the complex sequence
of events which takes place during a collision, and possibly even
the evolution of spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies.

Earlier Hubble pictures show that nearly a third of very

distant galaxies, which existed early in the history of the
universe, appear to be interacting galaxies, like The Antennae.
In particular, the Hubble Deep Field (a "long-exposure" image from
Hubble looking at galaxies far back into time) uncovered a
plethora of odd-shaped, disrupted-looking galaxies. They offer
direct visual evidence that galaxy collisions were more the rule
than the exception in the early formation period of the universe.

These distant galaxy collisions are too faint and too small
to study in much detail. Astronomers say we are fortunate to have
such a nearby example as The Antennae to study, since collisions
between galaxies are relatively rare today. "The degree of detail
in these images is astounding, and represents both a dream come
true and a nightmare when it comes to the analysis of such a large
amount of data," Whitmore said.

In addition to providing a window into how stars and

galaxies formed in the dim past, the Hubble views also might offer
a glimpse of the future fate of Earth's home galaxy, the Milky
Way, when it either sideswipes or plows head-on into the
neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

The Hubble observations of The Antennae galaxies, as well

as several other nearby colliding galaxies, were conducted by
Whitmore and co-investigators Schweizer, Bryan Miller, Michael
Fall, and Claus Leitherer over the past several years.
 Hubble's resolution and sensitivity allowed the team to
uncover over 1,000 exceptionally bright young star clusters,
sometimes called super star clusters, within The Antennae -- the
prototypical galaxy smashup. Ground-based images only were able
to see the brightest of these clusters, and even in these cases
were not able to show that the clusters were very compact with the
sizes of normal globular clusters.

Observing other galaxy collisions, the Hubble team

discovered the presence of young star clusters which were very
bright and blue in the case of ongoing collisions, but had faded
to become fainter and redder for the older merger remnants. This
allowed them to place the snapshots of galaxy collisions into a
chronological sequence.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. for
NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European Space
Agency.

- end -

EDITOR'S NOTE: Images to accompany this release are available to

news media representatives by calling the NASA Headquarters
Imaging Branch at 202/358-1900. Photo numbers are:

color B&W
Full view 97-HC-625 97-H-625
Detail 97-HC-626 97-H-626

A photo and caption are available via the World Wide Web at URL:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/97/34.html and via links in
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Latest.html or
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html.

Images are available via the World Wide Web at URL:

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/gif/n40389w.gif,
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/gif/n40389d.gif (GIF),
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/jpeg/n40389w.jpg and
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/jpeg/n40389d.jpg (JPEG).
 Image files also may be accessed via anonymous ftp from
oposite.stsci.edu in /pubinfo: gif/n40389w.gif, gif/n40389d.gif
(GIF), jpeg/n40389w.jpg and jpeg/n40389d.jpg (JPEG).

Higher resolution digital versions (300 dpi JPEG) of the

release photograph are available in /pubinfo/hrtemp: 97-34a.jpg97-
34b.jpg (color), 97-34abw.jpg and 97-34bbw.jpg (black &white).
Full resolution TIFF images are available in
/pubinfo/tiff/1997/34a.tif, 34b.tif, 34c.tif, 34d.tif, 34e.tif and
34f.tif.