On Halloween, NASA Released Photos of the ‘Greater Pumpkin’, Galactic Collision

While people are celebrating Halloween, NASA has released brilliant images of the newly discovered ‘greater pumpkin’. Images from the US space agency’s Hubble Space Telescope show what looks like a giant jack-o’-lantern in outer space. According to NASA, the cosmic ‘Greater Pumpkin’ which looks like a Halloween decoration tucked away in a patch of sky is actually a picture of the early stages of a collision between two galaxies.

While sharing the video and the image on its website, NASA wrote, “Sorry Charlie Brown, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is taking a peek at what might best be described as the ‘Greater Pumpkin'”.

The pumpkin’s face consists of two aging red stars, which form the eyes and gives the region an orange glow, and a cracked blue smile made up of newborn star clusters. With a scattering of blue stars in the background, the image looks as though the pumpkin dressed up in glitter for Halloween. According to the US space agency, the entire view is nearly 109,000 light-years away — approximately the diameter of our Milky Way.

While explaining the image, NASA said that the ‘smile’ may be the beginning of the process to rebuild a spiral galaxy. The arm of the smile embraces both galaxies and was most probably formed when interstellar gas was compressed as the galaxies began to merge.

NASA informed that most of the time when two galaxies collide, they lose their typical flattened disk shape and the stars within each galaxy get scrambled into a new football-shaped space forming an elliptical galaxy.

The space agency added, “But this interacting pair is a very rare example of what may turn out to result in a bigger fried egg—the construction of a giant spiral galaxy. It may depend on the specific trajectory the colliding galaxy pair is following. The encounter scenario must be rare because there’s only a handful of other examples in the universe.”