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Video & Multimedia

JohnnyRingo

(20,971 posts)

3. Galaxies even collide...

Reply to yuiyoshida (Original post)

Fri Sep 23, 2016, 09:58 PM

Sep 2016

...without collision of it's stars. The galaxies even pass right through each other and become distorted by gravitational forces. The reason this can happen was explained by Carl Sagan in "Cosmos".

If we could shrink a galaxy down to the size of a quarter, the nearest galaxy in it's local group could be just about three feet away. That's why they set out on a collision course.

If we could shrink our sun down the the size of that quarter, the nearest star in the galaxy would be about 400 miles away. It's hard to imagine such scale when viewing an image of a distant galaxy.

Thanx for posting. K&R

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Highlight:

Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time [Ultra HD, Captioned] [View all] yuiyoshida Sep 2016 OP

It highlights just how insignificant we are, or perhaps just how unique still_one Sep 2016 #1

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and... Buckeye_Democrat Sep 2016 #2

Galaxies even collide... JohnnyRingo Sep 2016 #3

Thank you for this... First Speaker Sep 2016 #4

That image of the Sombrero Galaxy is one of my all time faves! CrispyQ Sep 2016 #5