Post #414

This image is from a series of NASA Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. This was the largest galaxy census ever carried out. It relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies in only 175 days! The project achieved what would have been years of work for a professional astronomer, and has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects. This image shows what appears to be three galaxies merging and all of the chaotic star formation and tidal distortions caused by the merger. The location of this mass of dust and bright swirls of stars lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer.