After Repair, Hubble Captures Images of 'Rarely Observed' Colliding Galaxies (cbsnews.com) 21
UnknowingFool shares a report from CBS News: After being down for a month due to a computer issue, Hubble was brought back up last week. NASA released images captured by Hubble over the weekend including a rare observance of two galaxies that are colliding. The other interesting image is that of a spiral galaxy with three arms, as most spiral galaxies have an even number of arms. "I'm thrilled to see that Hubble has its eye back on the universe, once again capturing the kind of images that have intrigued and inspired us for decades," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. "This is a moment to celebrate the success of a team truly dedicated to the mission. Through their efforts, Hubble will continue its 32nd year of discovery, and we will continue to learn from the observatory's transformational vision."
Thats not an arm (Score:3, Funny)
It's _really happy_ to see another galaxy after a long time of social distancing.
Forgive me, the humor was too obvious. The isolation of the pandemic has been hard on all of us.
Didn't miss out on this rare "observance" (Score:3)
The occurrence of a galaxy with an odd number of spiral arms is probably as rare as a person with an odd number of -- OK, people get the idea.
Still, even though this is a transitory condition resulting from the collision of galaxies, somehow I have the impression that this state-of-affairs will be observable for hundreds and perhaps even a single-digit millions of years? This is not like a supernova where if the Hubble was "down" for an entire month, it would have missed the scientifically interesting p
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This is certainly true. But the Hubble telescope is _busy_, it has to be aimed at particular regions of the sky to get these images, and there is a great deal of sky to study.
Lucky (Score:2)
Very fortunate to capture the collision. would like to see the aftermath.
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Rare Observance? (Score:2)
Umm...sure. It's not like every galaxy is in the immediate process of merging with another, but given that galactic mergers take place over billions of years, once one is identified it can be observed over millions of human lifetimes.
Re:Rare Observance? (Score:4)
A pedant writes: "Rare observation" is a reflection of how often astronomers choose to look at them; "rare occurrence" tells you that that there are few instances of colliding galaxies.
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Indeed. We know of quite a number of such mergers currently happening and within a human lifetime they won't even appear to move. It's just that there are precious few telescopes that can see many of these events and the observation time of them is limited, so it is indeed rarely observed.
To quote the one detail the movie Armageddon likely got right: "it's a big ass sky.".
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Three arms? (Score:4, Funny)
more valuable for "pollution free" shots (Score:1)
No, digital edited is not the same, and even ultra black coatings are a fig leaf.
How galaxies collisions affect stars systems? (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity, I always wondered how those collisions affect star systems inside of them. For instance, let's jump 5 billion years in the future when our Milky Way will collide with Andromeda and assume the Sun wouldn't have turned into a red giant. How will it affect life on earth?
My guess was that unless we're heading straight into the center of Andromeda where the black holes are, the collision won't affect us much. But I'll be curious to learn if we could expect strange things like time distorti
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My senior project back in the mid-70s was a simpler implementation of the colliding galaxy simulation done by the Toomre brothers [harvard.edu] a couple years earlier. As you may have guessed, things have come a long way since.
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Galactic collisions tend to generate bursts of star formation because of colliding gas clouds, shock waves traveling in different planes then have affected the clouds previously, and gravitational fields pulling on the clouds. Some of these things will cause an excess of supernovas, which also cause more star formation and create new gas clouds.
There would be minimal effect on a specific star system, unless it were to pass near the galactic core. Then gravity from the central black hole or a near pass of
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In the cores of globular clusters - where the density of stars/cubic parsec is comparable to the core of the galaxy, you get a few tenths of a percent of "blue straggler" stars (their colour makes them relatively easy to find) which are generally thought to be the consequence of stars colliding when the globular cluster passes through the galaxy core, or through other globular clusters.
Star-on-star collis
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I thought the Andromeda collision was slated for a bit sooner than that. [checks]
Which settles it nicely. The galactic collision will have negligible impact on Earth, and non on Earth's life, w
It's black-and-white (Score:1)
shit, the color's still busted. Darned compewters!
"merge" is a better term for galaxies. (Score:2)
Most of the stars merge into their new home. If our sun were scaled to the size of a grapefruit , the nearest next next star would be another grapefruit 2500 miles away.