Hubble has helped confirm that the Milky Way will merge with which nearby galaxy?
We now realize that our own Milky Way has in the past
merged with other galaxies and will be merging with our neighbor
spiral the Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years, Hubble has discerned that
we're on a head-on collision but it shouldn't be too disruptive to
our solar system.
"Visualization of Earth's night sky in 3.75 billion years, as Andromeda approaches and merges with the Milky Way."
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What Hubble has revealed is that the universe has in fact
changed over these billions of years of time
the early galaxies, the very distant ones as we see them,
are simple, sometimes they're messy looking, they're small,
they haven't had time yet to form that grand
spiral structure.
Over time we see galaxies actually merging with other galaxies and growing
bigger and bigger and those mergers, by the way, can look like train
wrecks in our Hubble images. This is something that I'm grateful to
the Hubble Space Telescope for opening our eyes to.
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