Telescope's dark energy camera captures large galaxy absorbing smaller one

July 25 (UPI) -- Space is a big place, but that doesn't prevent galaxies from colliding with their nearby neighbors, especially as they grow over billions of years and larger galaxies consume smaller ones.

Now, the start of this cataclysmic collision between two vastly different-size star systems has been captured in new images taken by the U.S. Department of Energy's Dark Energy Camera at the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile.

Researchers there at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory used the camera to record images of the massively large spiral galaxy NGC 1532 -- known commonly as Haley's Coronet -- as it starts to consume the nearby and much-smaller dwarf galaxy NGC 1531 in the Eridanus constellation some 55 million light-years from Earth.

In their findings published Tuesday, researchers said the new images show how even smaller galaxies can influence the gravitational aspects of a much larger star system such as NGC 1532, which eventually will consume all of the dwarf galaxy billions of years into the future.

Images captured with the Dark Energy Camera show the smaller star system distorting the spiral arm of stars in the larger Haley's Coronet while "plumes of gas and dust" are seen bridged between the two galaxies.

Scientists say the images show how such interactions can create bursts of new stars, too, and that our own Milky Way galaxy most likely has undergone such a process multiple times in the past.

Eventually, both galaxies will become one.

Not all colliding galaxies respond the same way, the researchers say, noting that massive colliding galaxies of the same size typically form distinctly new galaxies with different shapes and characteristics.

The researchers noted that such a collision is what will happen 4 billion years from now when the Milky Way collides with the equally large Andromeda galaxy.

Chile's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory is a complex of telescopes and space-observing instruments about 300 miles north of Santiago. It is the epicenter of control of the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab.

It's 4-meter telescope is named in honor of Victor Manuel Blanco, a Puerto Rican astronomer who discovered a nearby galactic cluster in 1959 that eventually was named Blanco 1.