The End is Near

The end of the universe as we know it is imminent.

Astronomers (for those of you in Arizona "really smart space watching guys") have observed through the Hubble Space Telescope the fate of our galaxy.

They snapped this picture of a galactic collision that began 500 million years ago and continues to this day (at least as far as we can tell through the HST).

"Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image centre are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dark brown dust. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by pink hydrogen gas."

Scientest say this is a picture of what will happen when the Milky Way collides with the cosmically close Andromeda galaxy. Pack your bags and head for the giant space ark, because we only have six billion years left.

tagged: space, science, collision, galaxy, Mikly Way, Andromeda, Hubble Space Telescope