Galaxy crash sparks large spiral

A team was looking through data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex) satellite for star-forming regions around a galaxy called NGC 6872. But they were shocked to see a vast swathe of ultraviolet light from young stars, indicating that the galaxy is actually big enough to accommodate five of our Milky Way galaxies within it. The find was reported at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.
 
NGC 6872, a galaxy about 212 million light-years away in the constellation Pavo, was already known to be among the largest spiral galaxies. Near it sits a lens-shaped or lenticular galaxy called IC 4970, which appears to have crashed through the spiral in recent astronomical times.
 
Rafael Eufrasio of the Catholic University of America and Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and the European Southern Observatory in Chile were interested in a number of regions away from the galaxy.
 
"I was not looking for the largest spiral – it just came as a gift," Mr Eufrasio told BBC News. Galex – a space telescope designed to search for the ultraviolet light that newly born stars put out – hinted that NGC 6872 was made much larger in size by the collision.
 
The team went on to use data from a range of other telescopes including the Very Large Telescope, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey and the Spitzer space telescope – each of which sees in a particular set of colours, in turn evidencing stars of varying ages.