Hubble Takes Pictures of Colliding Galaxies

Jerry Smith writes "The Register reports that the Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong, and took snapshots of two colliding galaxies. The sizes average between thousands and hundreds of thousand light years, containing ten million to one trillion stars. The process took hundreds of millions of years, and will take many more hundreds of millions of years."

Comments

collision

[sporkme]

Just... wow. Great to see that there is life in the old girl yet. Our galaxy is to suffer a similar fate, some 3 billion years hence.

Re:collision

[robbak]

I don't know about your story, but I do know that the focal length of the hubble miror was wrong, and they only detected it when it was actually in space, due to damage (lost chip of paint IIRC) to a mesuremant device.
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/mis sions/sts-103/hubble/archive/900914.html : Search for "hubble glasses" reveals others.

Higher quality image

[bcat24]

You can find a really high resolution copy (3915x3885 as a TIFF or JPEG) of the image here. Hmm, this might make a pretty desktop wallpaper.

Re:Should I panic now or wait a billion years firs

[Gr8Apes]

Considering that in about 5 billion years time it's projected that earth will be inside the sun (a red giant by that time) I think you'll have other things to panic over...

Re:Amazing

[Nimey]

Just so you know, that and pretty much any astronomical picture is false-color. Still pretty, but scientists gave it a helping hand.

Re:Amazing

[Chosen Reject]

But then you would be wrong. Artisits have nothing to do with these pictures. Several images are taken in different spectrums which are grayscale versions of those pictures. Then the grayscale is put into red, green, or blue only color and three of them combined to make one picture. False color yes, because the spectrums the grayscale pictures are taken are not necessarily red, green and blue, but artists have nothing to do with it. Sometimes they choose color spectrums to enhance, sometimes to make it look natural, but artists never touch these images.

Re:There is life in those galaxies

[Chosen Reject]

You don't have to look so far away. The Milky Way is not all that quiet seeing as how we have a galaxy passing right through us right now as well. The Canis Major Dwarf is closer to Earth the center of the Milky Way.