The Hubble Space Telescope has captured two galaxies in the middle of a collision at a very safe distance of about 570 million light years from Earth.

This is Arp 122, a special cosmic object that actually consists of two galaxies: NGC 6040, the tilted and warped spiral galaxy, and LEDA 59642, the circular and forward spiral.

Looming in the lower left corner is the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041, a central member of the galaxy cluster that hosts Arp 122 but otherwise not involved in this monstrous merger, he explains. Europe Press.

Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic events, but they occur on a very slow time scale. For example, the Milky Way is on a collision course with its nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), but these two galaxies are about four billion years apart before they actually meet.

The collision and merger process will also not happen quickly: it could take hundreds of millions of years to develop. These collisions last so long because of the truly enormous distances involved, NASA explained in a statement.

Galaxies consist of stars and their solar systems, dust, gas and invisible dark matter. Therefore, in galactic collisions, these constituent components can undergo enormous changes in the gravitational forces acting on them.

Over time, this completely changes the structure of the two (or more) colliding galaxies, sometimes ultimately resulting in one merging galaxy. This could very well be the result of the collision shown in the image.

Galaxies resulting from mergers are believed to have a regular or elliptical structure, because the merger process changes more complex structures (such as those observed in spiral galaxies). (JO)