The footage is incredible… and reminds us just how small we are in comparison to the rest of the Universe. Using footage captured by the Hubble space telescope, NASA published an incredible video: a simulation of an intergalactic collision.
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We now know the fate that awaits our Milky Way in 4 billion years seeing as though we’re heading straight for our neighbor, Andromeda. A very common phenomenon in the cosmos, that ends up with an immense cluster of billions and billions of stars. This is known as galactic fusion.
To study this journey, astronomers from the North American Space Agency created this simulation using a super computer and real photos taken by the Hubble telescope.
A billion years in 1 min 30
They have been able to get a better understanding of this type of event. In one minute thirty, the video gives us a good overview of what happens… which in reality, takes a billion years. According to scientists, at the end of this transition, a new galaxy is created, which, over millions of years, changes in quite a chaotic way.
By combining real life footage with that calculated by their supercomputer, astronomers were able to put together a fascinating simulation, the closest possible representation of reality. We can see the different stages of the collision by following the celestial movements and it looks just like a magnificent, almost hypnotizing, cosmic dance.
