THE first images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) were released last week. This view reveals previously unseen tails of stars and hot gas curving away from two colliding spiral galaxies 300 million light years away. The pair, dubbed “the mice”, will merge in 400 million years time to create an elliptical galaxy, with the tails forming globular clusters and dwarf galaxies around it, says astronomer Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University.
ACS is 10 times as sensitive as earlier cameras and has also revealed faint galaxies that formed only about a billion years…
