Celestial Sundays: Eye in the Sky

This week's photo gives a whole new meaning to the old adage of "eye in the sky". Several decades back, "eye in the sky" most probably means spy satellites or surveillance planes. It could still be the meaning now.

However, after seeing this photograph, tell me what you see.
Yep, that's right. It looks suspiciously like a lop-sided mask for Picasso's model. In actual fact, this is the image of two galaxies which are in the process of merging together. Of course, the moment this exact event in the image happened was 140 million years ago, and by all logic, should have ended ages ago, but due to the querks of speed of light, the information has just reached us after travelling a distance of 140 million light years. In all speculation, these two galaxies could probably be a super giant black hole right now, sucking other galaxies into it. We'll know in about 140 million years.....that is, if humans do not kill each other first.

A more complete description follows:
These shape-shifting galaxies have taken on the form of a giant mask. The icy blue eyes are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the mask is their spiral arms. The false-color image consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) and visible data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (blue/green).

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 met and began a sort of gravitational tango about 40 million years ago. The two galaxies are tugging at each other, stimulating new stars to form. Eventually, this cosmic ball will come to an end, when the galaxies meld into one. The dancing duo is located 140 million light-years away in the Canis Major constellation.
Source: NASA
Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/Vassar