These two galaxies are in the midst of a collision of astronomical proportions.
They're so far away that this collision has nothing to do with us, but the collision may give us a glimpse into the very distant future — when our galaxy collides with Andromeda.
The galaxies in question do not have proper names, but are called NGC 6040 and LEDA 59642.
The collision itself occurs 570 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Hercules. The collision sounds very dramatic, but this is something very different from what we think of as a collision.
In extremely slow motion
These two galaxies likely contain hundreds of billions of stars, like our own Milky Way.
A very large number of these stars may have their own solar systems with planets, so these galaxies can be seen as an absolutely massive collection of stars, planets, dust and dark matter. Which scientists still don't know what something is.
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And so these galaxies are on their way to each other. No one knows how long this will take, but it is unlikely to take a lot of time. At least several hundred million years, according to NASA.
It is also not known exactly what is happening to these two galaxies. They can enter each other, mix with each other and eventually form a new giant galaxy.
There is very little risk of collisions as we think of them, i.e. stars or planets colliding with each other.
The Andromeda Galaxy as it can be seen with a telescope from Earth today. It is heading towards us at an amazing speed of more than 100 kilometers per second. But it is very far. (Photo: David Dayag/CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Andromeda crash
We have our own colliding galaxy in our very distant future. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with each other in about four billion years.
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The Andromeda Galaxy is a galaxy much larger than the Milky Way, and may contain over a thousand billion stars. She's heading towards us.
But the impact is so long that the sun would shine brighter than it does today, by more than 40 percent, according to the journal. The universe today.
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It would make the Earth so hot that it would become uninhabitable, but if there were still people in the solar system, it's unlikely they would have noticed the collision at all.
Even if galaxies appear dense and solid from a distance, as in the collision in the image above, there is still an unmanageable distance between each star. Our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is more than four light-years away.
It will take the Voyager 1 space probe more than 73,000 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor. According to NASA.
Hence, so far between every star in both the Milky Way and Andromeda, an actual collision between stars is extremely unlikely, According to Astronomy magazine.
Here the Andromeda Galaxy is released into the night sky as we know it from Earth. This is what it could look like in about four billion years, if someone could observe the collision. (Image: NASA, ESA, Z. Levi, R. van der Marel, STScI, T. Halas, and A. Mellinger)
If our sun were the size of a ping-pong ball, the nearest star would be more than 1,000 kilometers away, according to the magazine. It gives a picture of how likely collisions are in our part of the galaxy.
But if it were possible to observe the night sky around the time of the collision, it would likely be a fascinating sight.
(This issue It was first published in Forskning.no).
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