Image: Hubble captures a monster merger

This NASA/ESA Hubble Area Telescope picture options Arp 122, a peculiar galaxy that in truth contains two galaxies—NGC 6040, the tilted, warped spiral galaxy and LEDA 59642, the spherical, face-on spiral—which might be within the midst of a collision. This dramatic cosmic encounter is situated on the very protected distance of roughly 570 million light-years from Earth. Peeking in on the lower-left nook is the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041, a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in, however in any other case not collaborating on this monster merger.

Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic occasions, however they happen on a really sluggish timescale. For instance, the Milky Way is on observe to collide with its nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), however these two galaxies have an excellent 4 billion years to go earlier than they really meet. The method of colliding and merging is not going to be a fast one both: it’d take a whole lot of tens of millions of years to unfold. These collisions take so lengthy due to the actually huge distances concerned.

Galaxies are composed of stars and their solar techniques, dust, fuel, and invisible dark matter. In galactic collisions, due to this fact, these constituent elements could expertise huge adjustments within the gravitational forces performing on them. In time, this utterly adjustments the construction of the 2 (or extra) colliding galaxies, and generally in the end ends in a single, merged galaxy.

That might be what outcomes from the collision pictured on this picture. Galaxies that consequence from mergers are thought to have a daily or elliptical construction, because the merging course of disrupts extra complicated constructions (comparable to these noticed in spiral galaxies). It will be fascinating to know what Arp 122 will appear like as soon as this collision is full… however that won’t occur for an extended, very long time.