When I searched for astrophysics news, I was pleasantly surprised to find one about galaxy interaction. Galaxy interaction as a topic is rarely discussed enough, even when it occurs on a daily basis and will likely happen to our own galaxy, given enough time. Recently, the picture above clearly highlighted two galaxies that are nearing collision and their vastly different histories. These two galaxies, NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 , although neighbors, have done dramatically differing amounts in getting to where they are.
NGC 1316, as seen in the picture, has pretty clear residue and aftermath of more outer layers of its galaxy that are not condensed and highly orbiting, rather, just residually following. To follow the article, this is indicative of galaxy collision, or “galaxy serial killer,” as a result of the clear larger amount of stars and the dust lanes that fill the space between the clusters of stars. The imagery used by the article is that this galaxy “swallowed” this other galaxy to create its current form.
What interested me about this topic to begin with is a fairly popular gif image created that illustrates the impending collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies, believed to look like the image below.
While is image is stunningly beautiful and appears to create a new sort of star or black hole, the idea that stars will collide is unlikely at best due to the raw space between stars in both galaxies. Using the Hubble Space Telescope data, researchers found that this collision of galaxies is inevitable for the foreseeable future, and that the collision of black holes would lead to a new one due to the nature of supermassive black holes, but this process itself, on top of the billion years we have before the collision, could take millions longer. The collision is again enjoyable to think about as a thought, due to its implications and the future thought required to imagine if there would even be life on earth to observe what would happen during that time.
Sources:
Carroll, Ostlie. An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140402095846.htm
