July 18, 2010
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
The Antennae Galaxies in Collision
Birthday · July 18, 2010
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published July 18, 2010. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Two galaxies are squaring off in Corvus and here are the latest pictures. But when two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. That's because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. During the slow, hundred million year collision, one galaxy can still rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. In this clash of the titans, dark dust pillars mark massive molecular clouds are being compressed during the galactic encounter, causing the rapid birth of millions of stars, some of which are gravitationally bound together in massive star clusters.