New images taken by the Hubble space telescope released!

59 images of colliding galaxies

Our dear friend Hubble space telescope. He has been searching the skies for 18 years now, and as a gift for this anniversary, 59 new images were released. Each showing colliding galaxies. In fact, this is annoucned as the largest collection of Hubble's pictures released to the general public at one time. 59! Without further ado, here's where you can download these images:
www.spacetelescope.com At the lower-right part of the screen, under the "Downloads" you can (obviously) download the pictures. They are all actually merged into one file, so if you want high quality, you'll have to download either the 88MB .JPEG, or the original 181MB .tif.

So, you may still have one question. Galaxies collide? Well, they do! In fact, many relics of galaxies devoured by our Milky Way can be found in space. Scientists say that now Milky Way is absorbing the Saggitarius galaxy. Alas, our aggresive space-mother is on a collision course with our neighbour - the Andromeda galaxy, which is much more massive. 500.000 km/h is the speed of the galaxies drifting towards each other. Thus Earth's home in 2 billion years will be "Milkomeda". Why such a long time? Galaxies are huge, and it will take them millions of years to become one, larger galaxy. Another thing that popped up in my mind is what if Sun collides with an another star? Apparently, since empy space takes up most of the cosmos, there is little chance that we'll be devoured by an another gas giant. Besides, stars depend on each other's gravitational pull. So that means if a giant star passes nearby us, Sun might get caught in it's gravitational pull and either we're cooked or have a lot of daytime.

So, we find out that continents were moving around Earth. Similarly, galaxies are moving around space. What's further? The black empty mass? Or maybe something we haven't discovered yet...