Hubble Galaxies Merge

This photo, supplied by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), shows the Antennae galaxies in the sharpest image yet of this merging pair of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters. The two spiral galaxies started to fuse together about 500 million years ago making the Antenna galaxies the nearest and youngest example of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. (AP Photo/NASA-ESA)