Friday, January 24, 2014

APOD 3.2


The title of this picture, "Spiral Galaxies in Collision", immediately caught my eye because colliding galaxies frankly sounds terrifying. This photo shows the two galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 as they slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars. Billions of years, from now, only one of these galaxies will be left standing, and astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy of the two, will eventually win out, incorporating the smaller galaxy. What's strange is that when galaxies collide, stars almost never do because of the vast spaces between them.

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