NASA's Hubble Telescope captures a spectacular galactic collision

The mother of all collisions for Earth has (till now) been the asteroid that struck millions of years ago bringing the age of the dinosaurs to an end. Let's hope that remains the only planet-scale collision our homeworld has ever had the ill-fate to suffer. But Universe is filled with celestial bodies hundreds of times bigger than Earth. And when you consider galactic collisions, the scale is mind-boggling.

NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope has captured one such collision or merger of two galaxies each of which contains milliions and millions of stars and planets.

On Monday (January 8), the ESA posted the image on its official handle on X (formerly Twitter).

The image shows 'Arp 122'. It's a galaxy that contains two galaxies that are in the process of merging. In the upper part of this merger, is the galaxy NGC 6040. It is a spiral galaxy that's currently being warped due to the merger. Immediately below it, we have LEDA 59642, another spiral galaxy that's visible in 'face-on' position.

Both the galaxies are colliding

Due to their immense size, it takes years and years for such mergers to complete. We are talking about millions and millions of years. This is because, galaxies have so many stars planets, gas and dust that to neatly accommodate it with millions of stars, planets, gas and dust of the other galaxy, it requires time. And truly huge distances in space make galactic merger a really slow and long-drawn process.

Our Milky Way Galaxy will merge with its neighbour Andromeda galaxy. When they merge, both galaxies will lose their spiral shape and the resultant galaxy will not have the beautiful spiral arms we associate with Milky Way Galaxy.

But 4 billion years are to pass before both galaxies will even begin to merge. And complete merger will takes hundreds of millions of years more.

(With inputs from agencies)