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Hubble Takes Pictures of Colliding Galaxies

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hope-they-have-a-good-insurance-company dept.

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."

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. collision by sporkme · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    FairTax baby!
    1. Re:collision by robbak · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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      Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
  2. Higher quality image by bcat24 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.