This collision may also involve another nearby galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, which could be pulled into orbit around the merger as well before eventually colliding as well. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in around 4 billion years’ time. In other cases, the enormous gravitational forces involved in a collision can pull one or both galaxies into strange shapes. Typically if a larger galaxy collides with a smaller satellite galaxy, the larger galaxy will strip away stars and material from the smaller galaxy and maintain most of its shape. ![]() Satellites like SpaceX’s Starlink are disrupting Hubble observationsĪlthough it’s unlikely that stars from each galaxy will collide, because of the amount of space between each star, the heart of most galaxies contains a supermassive black hole, and the merging of these huge beasts can give off gravitational waves and send stars flying off in strange directions. Roman Space Telescope will survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble Despite the fault in Hubble's mirror, the space telescope's first light image shows just how much clearer its view of the Universe was when compared with ground-based telescopes. Stunning space station video shows glorious aurora over Earth The results of these enormous collisions can be varied, with either the galaxies merging to form a new larger galaxy, as is the case here, or one galaxy annihilating another. Galactic collisions, when two or more galaxies meet each other, are not uncommon in the universe. Our own galactic neighbors are much further away Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, is more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.” “While that might sound like a safe distance, for galaxies this makes them extremely close neighbors. Thirty years ago the Hubble Space Telescope began snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the. “This colliding trio – known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189 – is a relatively rare combination of three large star-forming galaxies lying within only 50,000 light-years of one another,” Hubble scientists write. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely near this scene, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. ![]() A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The trio, located in the Boötes constellation, are in the process of merging and will eventually form one single large galaxy. This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic collision of three different galaxies.
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