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

Re:collision

[Scutter]

I remember reading, as a kid, an article in some kids' magazine about the creation of the mirror for the Hubble. In particular, I remember reading about this hairline crack they found and how they weren't sure if it would destroy the mirror altogether. Ultimately, to fix it, they cored out the area, leaving a small circular hole. When they finished polishing, the mirror (even with the hole) was even more accurate than they had originally hoped. It's kinda cool to still see pictures and science like this from an instrument I (sort of) grew up with.

Naked eye with a big amateur scope

[Zenicetus]

This is a very cool object, and because it's (relatively) close, it's visible to the human eyeball in a large amateur telescope, at a dark sky site (not QUITE like this Hubble image, obviously).

I've tracked it down in my old 18" Newtonian/Dobsonian. With averted vision, you can see two "tails" twisting off the pair, much further out in the field than these Hubble images. Here's what it looks like in an amateur scope, but imagine it as just a dim hint in the eyepiece:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1997/34/images/ c/formats/web.jpg

It's nothing at all like the Hubble image... just a hint of grey glow in the eyepiece, but still... there is something about seeing the actual photons from the object hitting your retina that's exciting, for us amateur astronomy geeks, anyway.

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

[mikael]

Intersting stuff.. but when you consider time scales like this what kind of practical applications does this have?

A greater understanding of the laws of gravity. We can construct simulations of colliding galaxies, but being able to see the real thing helps confirm those theories.