The Hubble Space Telescope is still trucking on in orbit 32 years after launch, made necessary because the should-be-renamed L2 machine which still hasn’t returned science data was delayed for so long. In total, Hubble has taken data on 50,000 targets across 1.5 million observations.

Even as it ages, Hubble continues to produce amazing science, and the team released another pretty picture to commemorate this anniversary. It’s not just a pretty picture, however; there is a cool story to go along with it.

The five galaxies in the new image are called The Hickson Compact Group 40. It is a gravitationally interacting cluster of three spiral, one elliptical, and one lens-shaped galaxy. Scientists know they are gravitationally interacting because observations in the X-ray show hot gas in between them. Infrared observations tell how many stars are forming. And radio light observations show us there are strong sources in the center of each galaxy that could be supermassive black holes.

Lots of galaxy clusters exist, but this one is special. These galaxies are off by themselves in the constellation Hydra, and the cluster is one of the densest known. According to the press release, in a billion years all of the galaxies will merge into one big elliptical galaxy. This kind of tight cluster was common in the early universe, and by studying them we can figure out when, how, and from what galaxies formed.

We’ll have a link to the full image in our show notes at DailySpace.org.

More Information

ESA Hubble press release

Hubblesite press release