14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was focused on Arp 116, a pair of peculiar galaxies flying together through space. The system is made up of Messier 60, the giant elliptical galaxy that looks like a white light burst, and the smaller, spiral galaxy NGC 4647.
An interesting fact about the former is that it's the third brightest galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, a large-scale formation towards which the Milky Way is heading, accompanied by Andromeda. The two galaxies will collide to form a new, elliptical galaxy long before they reach Virgo.
Messier 60 is around 120,000 light-years across, which means that it's only slightly larger than the Milky Way. It weighs around 1 trillion solar masses, and its core is powered by a supermassive black hole, around 4.5 billion times heavier than the Sun.
NGC 4647, seen towards the upper right corner of the Hubble image, has about the same size and mass as the Milky Way. The galactic pair was imaged using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 instruments on Hubble.