Hubble captures new image of two colliding galaxies

astronomy.com

34 points·sndean··7 comments

> (...) destined to spend millions of years colliding into each other before finally merging into a galaxy all their own.

> (...) about 350 million light-years from Earth.

So, they are already together, the problem is that light is just _too_ slow so we cannot see it yet. :)

Same thing is going to happen to us (the milky way) and Andromeda in about 4 billion years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

For more on the Andromeda/Milky Way collision: http://cs.astronomy.com/asy/b/astronomy/archive/2018/02/08/t...

"... an exciting galactic collision is underway." Seriously? Think about the civilizations that are about to be wiped out, the life forms that no one will ever know about, the ginormous black hole that will just get bigger.

Ok, so I'm only kind of serious. In the scheme of things all things change. I expect time is limited to less than a megayear for the systems on the edges of the arms like ours is on the Milky Way.

I don’t think a galactic collision is a particularly serious event for life. The stars are so sparse that the galaxies basically pass through each other. Their large scale structure is disrupted, but that won’t kill anything living in a solar system.

If anything I suspect a galactic collision would be a driver of increased star formation, and thus a catalyst for galactic recycling and chemical evolution within that Galaxy. It could even be something that leads to higher rates of biological evolution.

And like you said, the distance between the stars is what prevents this from being a total catastrophe.

What about disturbing their Oort cloud analog, spawning rogue comets?

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