Hubble Sees an Epic Merger of Three Galaxies

Galaxy mergers will restructure our little corner of the Universe over long periods of time. The Milky Way is in theof galaxies, along with another large spiral galaxy, Andromeda. In a few billion years, the pair will merge and form a single galaxy The Local Group also contains about 50 smaller galaxies and thousands of globular clusters. It’s arranged in a kind of dumbbell shape, with the Milky Way and its satellites in one lobe and Andromeda and its satellites in the other lobe.

It’s tempting to think that matter will keep combining into more and more massive agglomerations. But that’s not what will happen. Gravity is ultra-powerful, and if it were left to its own devices, it might eventually gather all matter together into one super-gigantic, ultra-turbo-massive elliptical galaxy. But gravity isn’t ultra-powerful, and it’s not alone.

It doesn’t end there. We can zoom out even further and see that the Virgo Supercluster is part of another structure called theThe Laniakea Supercluster with our Local Group in the center. Image Credit: By Andrew Z. Colvin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71065242

When we zoom back into the Milky Way, it seems small in comparison. Even the triple merger in the leading Hubble image seems small in comparison, and there are hundreds of billions of stars—maybe even more—involved in that merger, and who knows how many more tens or hundreds of thousands more stars are being born as a result. Don’t even try to guess the number of planets involved and if one of them might host life.

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