One of the universe’s most magnificent phenomena, a galactic merger, has been detected 60 million light-years distant in the Virgo constellation.
New photographs that show two galaxies on the edge of collision, as they were approximately 60 million years ago, and astronomers think it’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come for our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
The approaching merging was recorded by the Gemini North telescope of the International Gemini Observatory.
The two spiral galaxies, NGC 4568 and NGC 4567, are nearly the same distance from Earth to the core of the Milky Way, at 20,000 light-years apart.
However, as they approach one another, the magnitude of the collision will be released.
According to NOIRLab, which runs the observatory for the National Science Foundation, “their competing gravitational forces will spark bursts of furious star creation and drastically deform their once-majestic shapes.”
The galaxies will swing past one another over millions of years in ever-tighter loops, producing “long streamers of stars and gas.”
Eventually, NOIRLab predicted, they’ll be so intertwined that a single galaxy would “emerge from the turmoil” without the gas or dust necessary to produce stars.
The Milky Way will probably merge with the Andromeda Galaxy in around 5 billion years, so as captivating as watching the collision is, it also provides a bleak glimpse into the future of our galaxy.
When the Hubble Space Telescope discovered that Andromeda is “inexorably plunging into the Milky Way” at a speed of around 250,000 miles per hour, which is fast enough to go from Earth to the moon in an hour, NASA declared such a destiny in 2012.
However, according to NASA, the stars inside each of the galaxies will be so far apart that they won’t crash, but rather will be sent into various orbits around the new galaxy’s merged core.
Elliptical galaxies, which resemble stretched-out circles and contain little dust or gas to produce stars, are thought to be the result of these sorts of occurrences and are often duller than other galaxies.
The NGC 4568 and 4567 are expected to resemble Messier 89, another elliptical galaxy in Virgo, after their combined transition is complete, according to NOIRLab.