Awesome photo .
taken by NASA’s spitzer space telescope.
Story from msnbc.
Cool! I recall reading that that’s going to be us and the Andromeda Galaxy in a couple billion years, and that in all probability, the galaxies will pass right through one another without any stars colliding.
Wouldn’t the various energies of the galaxies play mayhem with one another?
Pretty much. Individual stars probably won’t collide, but their gravity will throw the structures of both galaxies out of wack.
Damn, something else to worry about!
I always save photos like this when I can find them. They all go into a folder named “perspective,” since that’s precisely what thinking about them yields.
Stuff like this blows my mind, every single time.
The universe is so frigging cool.
Fortunately, I was lucky and heard about it a long time ago, so I was able to clear my calendar.
Well, maybe not. We can measure the redshift to determine the motion component towards or away from us, but the transverse component is all but unmeasurable over the relatively short timespan over which we’ve been able to observe it. IOW, we know it’s moving generally towards us, but it could just as easily be in orbit around us (really a mutual orbit, but I digress) as be on a true collision course. Given the uncertainty of our measurements, the former is much more likely.