cosmic collision

Ashton Edwards
By Ashton Edwards
Astronomy
cosmic collision

Neighboring colossus: With a diameter of almost 200,000 light-years and around 1.6 trillion solar masses, the Andromeda galaxy is larger and heavier than the Milky Way. The image shows a section more than 40,000 light-years wide. Composed of 411 individual images with a total of 1.5 billion pixels, it is the largest and sharpest photo ever taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. More than 100 million stars and several thousand star clusters (blue) can be seen in the original.
© NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, BF Williams, LC Johnson/Univ. Washington, PHAT Team, R. Gendler

The future of the Milky Way is turbulent: first there is a crash with the Andromeda galaxy, then both islands of stars merge.

by RÜDIGER VAAS

Since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, space has been expanding and the clusters of galaxies moving away from each other. But on a smaller cosmic scale, in

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