Will the Milky Way collide with a nearby galaxy?

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning new image showing three distant galaxies tearing each other apart.

According to NASA, this cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these are common throughout the universe, and all large galaxies.

As chaotic as they seem, mergers like these are more about creation than destruction. As gas from the three neighbouring galaxies collides and condenses, a vast sea of material from which new stars will emerge is assembled at the centre of the newly unified galaxy.

Existing stars will survive the crash mostly unscathed; while the gravitational tug-of-war among the three galaxies will warp the orbital paths of many existing stars, so much space exists between those stars that relatively few of them are likely to collide, Live Science reported.

Discovery by volunteers

A citizen science project called Galaxy Zoo, helped astronomers detect the merger. The project invited more than 100,000 volunteers to classify images of 900,000 galaxies captured by the Hubble Telescope that were never thoroughly examined. 

The crowdsourced project accomplished in 175 days what would have taken astronomers years to achieve. 

The initiative has already resulted in a number of strange and exciting discoveries, like this one. 

Galaxy Zoo is part of Zooniverse which is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research. More than a million people around the world come together to assist professional researchers. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community. 

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How are galaxies formed?

Studying galactic mergers can help astronomers understand the Milky Way's past and future. 

The Milky Way is thought to have gobbled up more than a dozen galaxies over the past 12 billion years, including during the exceptionally named Gaia sausage merger.

Galaxies are collections of stars, gas, dust and dark matter held together by gravity.

Their appearance and composition are shaped over billions of years by interactions with groups of stars and other galaxies. Using supercomputers, scientists can look back in time and simulate how a galaxy may have formed in the early universe and grown into what we see today.

Galaxies are thought to begin as small clouds of stars and dust swirling through space. As other clouds get close, gravity sends these objects careening into one another and knits them into larger spinning packs.

Subsequent collisions can sling material toward a galaxy’s outskirts, creating extensive spiral arms filled with colonies of stars. 

READ MORE: Astronomers find the 'impossible': a galaxy without dark matter

'Space Triangle'

The Hubble Space Telescope continues to discover activities of galaxies.

A head-on collision between galaxies has created a vast, cosmic triangle in deep space glittering with star formation, the telescope captured.

The new photo, which NASA released last Tuesday shows a pair of colliding galaxies known as called Arp 143 arranged in a what scientists described as a "space triangle" that is spawning a "tsunami of starbirth" by sharing gas and dust, according to a Hubble team statement.

"The two galaxies in this system collided head-on, fueling the triangular-shaped burst of star formation," Hubble officials wrote in the image description.

"The pair contains the distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445 at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444 at left." 

This wave of starbirth produced by the collision, officials added, appears to be rare due to the triangle shape of star formation visible in the image. 

READ MORE: Discovery of 2 trillion galaxies rocks scientific community

Andromeda–Milky Way collision

Our Milky Way galaxy is destined to collide with our closest large neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, in about five billion years. Scientists can predict what’s going to happen.

The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA. 

Our sun will be a red giant by the time we merge with Andromeda, engulfing Mercury and Venus and then Earth as it grows to a diameter as large as Earth’s current orbit. But the sun can cause a lot of trouble for us well before that time.

Astronomers of the California Institute of Technology foretell how the two galaxies will become one. They watch previews by studying other galaxy mergers creating energetic new star-forming regions and smashing their central black holes together in a burst of gravitational waves.

According to Scientific American, we won’t be around to watch, but we will get a great view of other galaxies’ collisions. 

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