The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an incredible moment in time – the collision of two galaxies.
Well, it’s quite a long moment in time, but it is still spectacular.
The two galaxies, together known as Arp 122, are a very safe 570 million light-years from Earth, but are racing towards each other at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour.
However, when galaxies collide and merge, it can take hundreds of millions of years to actually happen because each is so enormous.
In the image, the side-on, slightly warped spiral galaxy NGC 6040 is travelling towards LEDA 59642, another spiral galaxy facing head on.
Galaxies are a complex cloud of stars, planets, dust, gas and invisible dark matter. They come in four main types – spiral, elliptical, peculiar and irregular.
When they collide, all of the individual elements experience massive and often violent changes in the gravitational forces around them, which can completely change the structure of the galaxies – or even merge them completely.
That may one day happen in the collision captured by Hubble.
‘Galaxies that result from mergers are thought to have a regular or elliptical structure, as the merging process disrupts more complex structures, such as those observed in spiral galaxies,’ said a statement from Nasa.
‘It would be fascinating to know what Arp 122 will look like once this collision is complete… but that will not happen for a long, long time.’
The image also serves as a timely reminder of the incredible discoveries made by Hubble, which is still going strong despite the new James Webb Space Telescope grabbing most of the headlines.
And speaking of things closer to home, our own galaxy the Milky Way is actually on a collision course with its nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, but there’s no need to panic – it will be about four billion years until they meet (although that’s just one billion years before our Sun explodes).
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