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Narrator (Megan Watzke, CXC): This beautiful image gives a new look at Stephan's Quintet,
a compact group of galaxies discovered about 130 years ago and located about 280 million
light years from Earth. A view in optical light from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
on Mauna Kea clearly shows four individual galaxies. A fifth, harder-to-see galaxy is
plunging its way through the system at almost two million miles per hour. This extreme motion
generates a shock wave that heats the gas between the galaxies. This in turn causes
the gas to glow strongly in X-rays, and that's detected by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Stephan's Quintet provides a rare opportunity for astronomers to observe a group of galaxies
in a crucial stage of its evolution.