NASA RELELARGEST-EVER COLLECTION OF HUBBLE IMAGES RELEASED

April 25, 2008

In conjunction with NASA’s 50th Anniversary and the Hubble Space Telescope's 18th launch anniversary, 59 new views of colliding galaxies were released today. The new images constitute the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public. These new Hubble images show how galaxy collisions produce a remark-able variety of intricate structures in never-before-seen detail.

Nearly all of the 59 new Hubble images are part of an immense exploration of lumi-nous and ultra-luminous infrared galaxies called the GOALS project (Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey). This survey combines observations from Hubble, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. Aaron S. Evans of Caltech is at the head of most of Hubble’s observations.

Astronomers observe the act of two or more galaxies colliding by a degree of one in about one million. This galactic demolition derby was much more frequent when our universe was much younger due to these galaxies being much closer to their counterparts.

The time scale in which such collisions happen is almost incomprehensible to the humans who observe them, spanning hundreds of millions of years in most cases.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency and is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington, D.C.

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