Hubble’s Colliding Galaxy Show: Stunning, beautiful, and wild

Hubble has found some of the most fantastic sights you could wish to see for their 18th anniversary of launch. The colliding galaxies are dancers on the wing, symphonies in space. With some of these pictures, you can practically feel it.

No doubt about it, if you roam the Hubble site it doesn’t get dull, and this particular release of pictures is really something special. This is the whole collection Cosmic Collisions Galore!, which has all the pictures in small thumbnails at the bottom. The colliding galaxies are part of a fascinating picture of cosmic evolution, and thankfully they're sights where wonder will always beat description. Our local stellar group used to be an independent small galaxy. That’s why we rotate in the opposite direction to the rest of the galaxy. Well, that and our lousy sense of direction… "How to park a stellar cluster", eh? In about 2 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will merge. The result will be a giant galaxy, and quite a sight for the inhabitants for thousands of generations. So can we try to get this parking thing right by then? The spiral galaxies seem to come up with the most dramatic effects, but the little guys with the curved arms doing the dances are just plain elegant. If you hit the next release page at the bottom you get a story about a star brighter than 10 million galaxies… Not that anybody’d be interested in that…