Making the news this week; M31, the Andromeda galaxy is due to collide with our own Milky Way in some 3 billion years. While this isn’t anything to lose sleep over, there are plenty of galaxies out there already experiencing this. Whilst individual stars are unlikely to collide in this process (there’s too much space between them, even in the relatively crowded space of a galaxy), the galaxy structures are massively disrupted due to gravitational forces. In this picture, we can see NGC 3226 (small elliptical) and NGC 3227 (spiral) interacting. Collectively, this pairing has the catalog id ARP 94 and is about 55 million light years away.
This picture is taken with GRAS-005, a Takahashi Epsilon 250 (Hyperbolic Flat-Field Astrograph) with an SBIG-10XME camera, 4x 5 minute exposures.
