Interesting Facts About Antennae Galaxies

The Antennae are two spiral galaxies interacting and combining their stars.
They began their cosmic dance hundreds of millions of years ago,
and are now at a phase where their colliding gas clouds are exploding with fresh star formation.
Only approximately 10% of the millions of new stars generated by the Antennae merger will live for more than 10 million years.
This is due to the fact that they will be gigantic blue supergiants,
a kind of star that rapidly burns its nuclear fuel and explodes as a supernova.
The gravitational interactions of the two galaxies drag long tails of gas away from one another,
and these tails are the locations of starburst activity.
The nuclei of these two galaxies will merge into one huge core in a few billion years,
with a supermassive black hole in its center.