Posted on 01/06/2025 11:41:46 AM PST by MtnClimber
Explanation: Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will 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. The featured image in scientifically assigned colors is a composite of Hubble exposures in visible light and Webb exposures in infrared light. Astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy on the right, will eventually incorporate IC 2163, the smaller galaxy on the left. In the most recent encounter that about peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy. The space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.
Who knows what the consequences of this collision might be? The end of the infield fly rule?
don’t want to get tangled up in THAT mess. hilly will call in some dark matter favors and we ALL know how that ends.
Either way, it’s gotta be one hell of a view!
They will eventually merge into one humongous galaxy!..................
Could be an optical illusion, and they are in reality light years from each other. Along the lines of a eclipse scenario. But it’s an interesting picture without question.
Webb Hubble? Say it ain’t so.
That’s us 4.5 billions years from now.
The Milky Way galaxy is about 150 million light years across and takes about 250 million years for the Earth/Sun to rotate once.
The pictured Galaxy arms are distorted so they are close, but close can still be really far.
Yeah, that is why we will likely never find another planet that is hospitable to support human life, within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Anything beyond our galaxy is a pipe dream, unless there is a way to beat the obstacles that prohibit the limitations we currently are faced with. Sans that, that the are against us hat we will ever find a replacement planet to run to.
Thank you as always for your pings!
With all this muck about Wed Hybble and the closeness of these galaxies I’m reminded of the Galaxy Song (not a Ford Galaxy)
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid
Obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you’ve had
Quite enough
Just remember that you’re standing
On a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second
So it’s reckoned
The sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at four hundred thousand miles an hour
In the galaxy we call the Milky Way
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick
But out by us, it’s just a thousand light years wide
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go ‘round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, of the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space
‘Cause it’s bugger all down here on Earth
Thanks to Monty Python:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.