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Europe’s ultra-powerful new WEAVE telescope, undergoing its inaugural ‘first-light’ instrument activation, recorded a collision between galaxies in a region of deep space called Stephan’s Quintet, where one of the galaxies was traveling at two million miles per hour. Designed to study the composition of stars and galaxies, the William Herschel Telescope is a 20-million Euro collaboration between France, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, and Spain, with the latter hosting the actual facility in La Palma. The facility’s Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) wide-field spectrograph’s Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) is the first of the telescope’s instruments to be activated and...

Explanation: The first identified compact galaxy group, Stephan's Quintet is featured in this eye-catching image constructed with data drawn from the extensive Hubble Legacy Archive. About 300 million light-years away, only four of these five galaxies are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. The odd man out is easy to spot, though. The interacting galaxies, NGC 7319, 7318A, 7318B, and 7317 have an overall yellowish cast. They also tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the predominantly bluish galaxy, NGC 7320, is closer, just 40 million light-years...