The Gemini North Telescope, located on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, USA, has discovered interacting spiral galaxies approximately 60 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation.
The galaxy pair NGC 4567 and NGC 4568, also known as the Butterfly Galaxy, has just begun to collide as gravitational forces pull them closer together.
Two spirals intertwining to form the shape of a butterfly.
In 500 million years, these two galaxies will complete their merger to form a single elliptical galaxy.
At this early stage, the two galactic centers are currently 20,000 light-years apart, and each galaxy maintains its own shape. As the galaxies tend to draw closer, gravitational forces will lead to numerous high-intensity star formation events. The original structure of the galaxies will change and become distorted.
Over time, these two galaxies will orbit around each other in gradually smaller circles. This tight looping dance will stretch and pull gas streams and stars, mixing the two galaxies into something resembling a sphere.
As millions of years pass, the intertwining of these galaxies will disperse the gas and dust necessary to trigger the star formation process, slowing it down and eventually halting it.
Observations of other galactic collisions and computer models have provided astronomers with additional evidence that the merger of spiral galaxies produces elliptical galaxies, which are also located in the Virgo constellation.
The brilliant light of a supernova, first detected in 2020, can also be seen in new images as a bright spot in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 4568.
The Milky Way Galaxy Merger
A similar galactic merger is expected to occur when the Milky Way eventually collides with the Andromeda Galaxy, our largest and closest neighbor. Astronomers at NASA used data from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 to predict when a direct collision between these two spiral galaxies could happen. This event is estimated to occur in about 4 to 5 billion years.
Currently, a massive halo surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy is indeed colliding with the halo of the Milky Way, according to research based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope published in 2020.
This neighbor, which may contain up to 1 trillion stars, is similar in size to our large galaxy and is only 2.5 million light-years away. While that may sound incredibly distant, on an astronomical scale, it makes Andromeda close enough to be seen in our autumn sky. You can spot it as a faint light in the high autumn sky.
NASA scientists state that it is unlikely our solar system will be destroyed when the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, but the sun may be pushed into a new region of the galaxy, resulting in some spectacular new sights in Earth’s night sky.
