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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Astronomers have cataloged galaxy collisions


Collisions between galaxies, it is a fairly common phenomenon. Almost all of the galaxies involved in one or More collisions during its existence. One example can provide as our Milky Way galaxy, is sent to the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor, at about 50 kilometers per second to run into her in about a billion years.

A group of researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the results of the latest observations of 31 interacting galaxies located in fourteen systems to carry out the first systematic analysis of the distribution of energy in the interacting galaxies over a wide spectral range.


Astronomers studied objects include all stages of the interaction of galaxies, starting from the early stages, in which the interaction was just beginning, and until the final states when the interaction effects are fully apparent.

The results demonstrated that the collision of galaxies in the star formation rate increases, but not as much as predictable. Scientists say that this may be due to the lack of representativeness of the sample, due to the small number of studied objects.

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