Stunningly beautiful.
Quite possibly, destruction on a scale I can’t begin to truly comprehend.
Awe-inducing.
–James
The thing about space is, it’s full of, well…space! Even as we see galaxies like these interact gravitationally, the actually occurrence of any stars directly colliding is extremely rare. The interstellar gas and dust will be sparked into regions of some pretty intensive star forming regions as the discs slowly merge of course, so in a sense, you’ll see the gas collapsing into what you could view as a more ordered state - new stars. However you see it - it’s beautiful!
Pretty indeed. If only the dimensions on the hi-res version were more suitable it’d be my new wallpaper.
If any of the stars in those galaxies have worlds which harbor life–and the odds, no matter how you figure them, seems greatly in favor of that–then the shifts in gravitation and the changes in the levels of radiation could prove fatal to that life.
So yes, beautiful, but also sad. Sad in a very distant way, of course, because if we’re just now seeing it, then it took place in the far distant past, before our world was even here, leaving its image in waves of light propagating across the heavens as a kind of eternal tombstone.
Perhaps there was no life there…but, just perhaps, there might have been.
–James
I think the probability of life in those galaxies as well as our own as being not only present but pervasive is quite high. I’d sure like to think so anyway. 