ESOshop: Mounted image 145: ALMA observations of the Antennae Galaxies

The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding spiral galaxies about 70 million light-years away. This image combines Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations, made during the observatory’s early testing phase, with visible-light observations. While visible light — shown here mainly in blue — picks out the stars in the galaxies, ALMA’s observations — shown here in red, pink and yellow — reveal the clouds of dense cold gas from which new stars form.

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