“Earlier today NASA released this gorgeous new image of two colliding galaxies that began colliding about 100 million years ago.
The imaging data, which were taken between 1999 and 2005, show the Antennae galaxies, so called because of the long antenna-like “arms,” viewed in wide-angle views of the system. NASA says the features got generated by tidal forces produced during the collision, which is still occurring some 62 million light-years away from the Earth.
It must be one heck of a show to observe up close as it has led to the formation “of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies”. The biggest of these young stars have already grown up and since exploded as supernovas.
To find your way through this composite photo, the image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is blue, the Hubble Space Telescope is in ggold and brown, while and the Spitzer Space Telescope is in red.”
Read more at CBS News
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nature has some of the most beautiful art =) if only they taught us this stuff in science class.
It looks like a big sparkly embryo. The galaxies are mating.
When I hear about colliding galaxies, I think of the Big Bang. That is, the Big Bang was supposed to start from Point 0, and expand away from that point. That gives me a radial dispersion. In this radial dispersion things just go away from one another. Collision doesn’t fit this idea, as for two objects to collide they need to get closer to each other. Even if the primordial soup was spinning around its axis this would happen. Nor if the Big Bang were a collection of a huge number of smaller bangs, since everything would still go away from the centre.
The only other idea is that those galaxies slowed down enough for their gravitational fields to attract them into each other, no longer going on radial trajectories.
If I’m wrong, it’s only because I quote hearsay (aka “popular belief”).
OK, last comment assumed one galaxy per path
Can NASA draw a itinerary for galaxies by any chance? You know, where they’ve been, where they’re going, that kind of stuff.
ooh pretty, and to think it probably only cost a few hundred billion dollars to get…
wow, so pretty but can you imagine what it must have been like ot have lived in those galaxies?
@Radu C, you seem to have forgotten the fact that universes are not solid matter. Therefore there’s no big-bang, it’s matter attracting and merging. It’s much like having a bucket of water and dropping in food colouring.
The big-bang (still no more than a theory), is different it’s more or less an implosion of a tiny solid particle. The smaller the particle the more energy it harvests to keep everything together. The singularity (beyond point zero) is the big complex question. Simply said: “Where on earth…” (wrong choice of words), “did that particle come from”.
So colliding universes is not comparable with a bigbang. Theoretically in certain parts of the universes you are completely safe (and imagine the spectacular views!)