Examples Of Galactic Collision

Galactic collision sounds like a scary term and many people imagine planets crashing into each other and explosions of some kind. Some people even think that a collision would mean the end of Earth as we know it. Surprisingly enough, galactic collision occur more often than people think and for the examples I will list below, you can see why in most cases, there’s nothing to fear on Earths end. Normal sized galaxies; such as the Milky Way galaxy, can contain an estimated 400 billion stars. In someone’s mind who knows nothing about Astronomy, they think that the larger the amount of stars, the more crowded the galaxy is. The truth is, that stars and planets are so far apart, the chances of them colliding with each other are small. That …show more content…
(2). While our planet Earth is thought to be safe from any aftermath of the merging galaxies, it’s estimated that our sun might be moved into a new region of our galaxy. As a galactic collision can take over a billion years to fully run its course and we wouldn’t live long enough to see it, computer simulations have shown us an estimate of what would happen amidst a merging such as this. The Hubble Space Telescope; in measuring the motions of the Andromeda galaxy, now tells us that Andromeda is falling toward the Milky Way galaxy due to the gravitational pull of both galaxies. (6). Because the collision is said to be head-on, many stars will most likely be thrown into different orbits as an effect of the new galactic center. Andromeda is currently moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 per hour. As fast as this may seem, it will still take approximately 4 billion years before it impacts our galaxy. (6). This merger will cause; not only stars and planets to move around into different orbits, but the Milky Way will lose its flat shape with the central bulge in the middle, and instead end up as an elliptical-shaped …show more content…
The Milky Way galaxy is thought to have formed by consuming multiple smaller galaxies. These collisions can trigger rapid star formations which cause the galaxy to be very luminous at infrared wavelengths. This rapid star formation can make systems thousands of times brighter than our own galaxy while active. “Many of the massive stars that are produced become supernovae whose explosive deaths enrich the environment with carbon, oxygen, and all the other elements that are essential for life. Interacting galaxies are important not only in shedding light on how galaxies evolve, form stars, and seed the interstellar medium, but because they can be very bright and seen across cosmological distances.”