Galaxies Collide
NASA has released a series of 59 new photographs to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. The images show galactic collisions in action and the peculiar shapes that result from the merging galaxies.
Galaxy collisions were more common in the early universe when the universe was smaller, so galaxies were closer together and therefore more likely to crash into each other. Even our own Milky Way contains debris from many smaller galaxies it has consumed over time. Currently the Milky Way is “eating” the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy.
The top predator galaxy is our giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, which is expected to devour the Milky Way in about two billion years. The future resulting elliptical galaxy has already been dubbed “Milkomeda.”
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