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Post Info TOPIC: CL0958+4702
Blobrana


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The biggest observed galactic crash is under way, as four enormous collections of stars converge on each other. But, dont worry about debris heading our way.
When the merger of the smaller galaxies is complete, the resulting galaxy will contain about 1 trillion stars, some 10 times the size of the Milky Way.
Unfortunately, none of us will ever see this happen. Although the galaxies are travelling at quite a clip, they are approaching each other much too slowly to see them move, said Kenneth J. Rines, who discovered the impending collision by accident while a postdoctoral astronomer at Yale University.

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CL0958+4702.kmz
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-- Edited by Blobrana at 14:39, 2008-01-12

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Blobrana


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Four galaxies are slamming into each other and kicking up billions of stars in one of the largest cosmic smash-ups ever observed.
The clashing galaxies, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will eventually merge into a single, behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. This rare sighting provides an unprecedented look at how the most massive galaxies in the universe form.

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Blobrana


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Four massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen, new observations reveal. The smash-up is shedding light on how the biggest galaxies in the universe form and why many of them stopped giving birth to stars billions of years ago.
Astronomers classify mergers according to the relative sizes of the galaxies involved. Minor mergers unite galaxies of vastly different size for example, a 'dwarf' galaxy and one the size of the Milky Way while major mergers join those of roughly equal size.
Now, researchers led by Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, have found the largest major merger ever seen. It involves a quartet of galaxies at the centre of a galactic cluster known as CL0958+4702, which lies about 5 billion light years from Earth.

4mereger_6

Four massive galaxies are colliding at the heart of a cluster of hundreds of galaxies. The whitish glow around them is from billions of stars kicked out of the merging quartet
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K Rines/CfA

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 19:23, 2007-08-06

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