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New image of colliding galaxies previews the fate of the Milky Way - CNN
Aug 10, 2022 1 min, 8 secs
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The Gemini North telescope, located on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii, spotted the interacting spiral galaxies about 60 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation.

Observations of other galactic collisions and computer modeling have provided astronomers with more evidence that mergers of spiral galaxies create elliptical galaxies.

Once the pair come together, the resulting formation may look more like elliptical galaxy Messier 89, also located in the Virgo constellation.

Andromeda's halo, a large envelope of gas, extends out 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy, almost halfway to the Milky Way, and as much as 2 million light-years in other directions.

This neighbor, which likely contains as many as 1 trillion stars, is similar in size to our large galaxy, and it's only 2.5 million light-years away.

You can see it as a fuzzy cigar-shaped bit of light, high in the sky during the fall.

And if we could see Andromeda's massive halo, which is invisible to the naked eye, it would be three times the width of the Big Dipper constellation, which dwarfs anything else in our sky.

Scientists at NASA said it's unlikely that our solar system will be destroyed when the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, but the sun might get kicked into a new region of the galaxy -- and Earth's night sky may have some new spectacular views.

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