The spectacular image of colliding galaxies released last week took 63 million years traveling through space at the speed of light to reach the Hubble Space Telescope. The scene depicts mayhem on a cosmic scale, destruction so awesome as to be scarcely imaginable.
Astronomers, astonished by their first close-up views of the celestial fireworks that occur during such collisions, are fascinated by the huge star clusters that are born. Titanic encounters create worlds as well as destroy them.
The older heart-shaped image taken from a ground-based telescope failed to reveal millions of stars such as the sun being formed from giant dust clouds, as the gravitational mix-master of the collision pushes and tugs, condensing their masses.
Hubble earlier showed that such galactic collisions were common in the newborn universe, and that there may be a big one in our future. Our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring Andromeda galaxy are speeding toward each other at 300,000 miles an hour. In 5 billion years, something earth-shattering may happen, even though the Earth won’t be around to see it. The sun will have died, incinerating this planet. Long before then, however, the human species may have colonized distant parts of the galaxy.
For scientists such as Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, Hubble’s breathtaking views are opening a cosmological candy store. The goodies are helping them understand how the universe came to be and where it’s heading.
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For an interview with Sir Martin Rees, see ON THE RECORD, Page 3.
