Surely an inspiration to writers of SF, space opera especially. EE Doc Smith would have loved these pics.
They're whole galaxies, colliding. Not two, but many. Mega-millions of stars. How can anyone, including that daft scientist who thinks the chances of intelligent other-earthly life are small, believe we're alone in all this?!
These kinds of images fill me with a mixture of wonder, awe and a kind of unfocused terror Exactly that sensation of 'the sublime' that the likes of Byron and Turner felt when they looked upon the Alps, I suppose. (And maybe Lovecraft would've seen the face of an Elder God in there somewhere!)
I agree with your sentiments regarding life in the universe: at least a hundred billion galaxies like those, each with a hundred billion stars, and who knows how many planets around each of those stars...I feel a Monty Python song coming on!
two galactic corporations operate by moving their galaxies around. The corporations decide to merge. To do this best, they bring all their stars together to one place so they will be under one command location. Like any merger, there is a serious mess up. They did not count on the clash of the space dust and the passage of the cores of the galaxies to create serious havoc. As with images we have of galaxy mergers, starts go flying wild in all directions before they eventually fall into line. the mega corporation finally settles their stars in place, then they are ready for the next corporate merger.
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Each star system is a molecule in the sea of space. the galaxy itself is a microbe of a larger scale. There are predators and prey. Once in a while two predators will meat and try to feed on each other. It happens that The milky Way and Andromeda are both predators.
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The Milky Way is on a colliding course with the Andromeda Galaxy. Or so the red shift suggests. In truth, astronomers simply do not know if there is a rectangular component of the velocity vector so these two galaxies could go right past each other.
Anyway, that will happen in a couple of billion years. The Sun will probably not exist then.
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Well, there is evidence that the milky way has already swallowed a small dwarf galaxy already. I can't seem to find the article which talked about the suspected medium sized massive black hole that would indicate the star cluster (which is off the plain of our galaxy) indicates it was most likely a dwarf galaxy that is either going to be sucked into the milky way, or has already lost it's outer stars to it already.
I'm waiting for the day we can create a wormhole to a nice distance out so we can get a nice picture of what our own galaxy looks like...
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Part of Alastair Reynolds's work has focused on colliding galaxies, specifically ours with another, and I found it fascinating. Also scary. Fortunately we won't be colliding with a galaxy any time soon, so there's not much for me to worry about right now.
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Exactly that sensation of 'the sublime' that the likes of Byron and Turner felt when they looked upon the Alps, I suppose. (And maybe Lovecraft would've seen the face of an Elder God in there somewhere!)
