Hubble Takes Pictures of Colliding Galaxies 74
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."
Re:collision (Score:3, Interesting)
Naked eye with a big amateur scope (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
A greater understanding of the laws of gravity. We can construct simulations of colliding galaxies [hubblesite.org], but being able to see the real thing helps confirm those theories.