Understanding the Beauty of Far Away Galaxies

Galaxies have always fascinated me, especially being able to see distant ones in pictures. It amazes me that all those stars, planets, and miscellaneous masses can be condensed into a mere image made up of pixels on my computer screen. Of course, for the majority of my lifetime I have known surprisingly little about them, and since the way I see the world allows me to see even more beauty in something when I understand it, I've decided to ponder the implications of those pixels on my screen.

This is a spiral galaxy, the most common variety of galaxy there is. ESO 510-13 is it's name, and I learned of it from this article.

At first glance, it looks like a sort of thin, astronomical cuttlefish, or a trail of stardust left behind after the passage of some unknown object. I wouldn't have guessed it was a spiral galaxy before taking this class. In my mind spiral galaxies have always looked like the one below.

Well, it turns out they're the same thing from different perspectives. To quote an extraordinarily helpful definition, "If you can clearly see the spiral shape, the galaxy is called a "face-on spiral." If you instead see the galaxy from the side, it is called an "edge-on spiral."" This means that ESO 510-13 is an edge-on spiral, and if we were seeing it from a different angle it would look roughly similar to the lower picture. 

Why am I giving you all this information that you probably already know? I'm building up to what makes ESO 510-13 so special. See, edge-on spirals tend to look more like this one.

If you haven't noticed the difference, ESO 510-13 is slightly warped, like a piece of cloth hovering in space while the lower one looks more like a frisbee. According to the first link, "These disks are thought to flatten out the way they do by the nature of the collision of gas clouds early in a galaxy’s lifespan." If that's the case, why are some galaxies warped? We aren't sure of course, but it seems that the best idea of why ESO 510-13 has turned out the way it is is either galaxies hitting each other or their gravitational pulls battling it out.

I guess I'm just asking you all to process information instead of just seeing it. Do what astronomers do; do not only seek out these sights, but endeavor to learn the stories of how they came to be and what they really are.