Zooming on ALMA’s view of the Antennae Galaxies

This zoom sequence starts with a view of the small constellation of Corvus (The Crow) and the bright star Spica near the top of the picture. As we zoom in, a pair of galaxies with long tails becomes apparent. These are the Antennae Galaxies (also known as NGC 4038 and 4039), a pair of distorted colliding spiral galaxies about 70 million light-years away. At the end of the sequence we see a new image from ALMA (shown in red, pink and yellow) that reveals the clouds of dense cold gas from which new stars form in greater detail than ever before. This is superimposed on a visible light view of the object from the ESO Very Large Telescope.