* Astronomy

VLT Looks into The Eyes of the Virgin

Credit: ESO/Gems project

ESO's Very Large Telescope has taken a striking image of a beautiful yet peculiar pair of galaxies nicknamed The Eyes. The larger of these, NGC 4438, was once a spiral galaxy but has become badly deformed by collisions with other galaxies in the last few hundred million years. This picture is the first to come out of ESO's Cosmic Gems programme, an initiative in which ESO has granted dedicated observing time for outreach purposes.
The Eyes are about 50 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) and are some 100 000 light-years apart. The nickname comes from the apparent similarity between the cores of this pair of galaxies - two white ovals that resemble a pair of eyes glowing in the dark when seen in a moderate-sized telescope.
But although the centres of these two galaxies look similar, their outskirts could not be more different. The galaxy in the lower right, known as NGC 4435, is compact and seems to be almost devoid of gas and dust. In contrast, in the large galaxy in the upper left (NGC 4438) a lane of obscuring dust is visible just below its nucleus, young stars can be seen left of its centre, and gas extends at least up to the edges of the image.

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