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Throughout this book we have emphasized the large distances between objects in space. You might therefore have been surprised to hear about collisions between galaxies. Yet (except at the very cores of galaxies) we have not worried at all about stars inside a galaxy colliding with each other. Let’s see why there is a difference.
The reason is that stars are pitifully small compared to the distances between them. Let’s use our Sun as an example. The Sun is about 1.4 million kilometers wide, but is separated from the closest other star by about 4 light-years, or about 38 trillion kilometers. In other words, the Sun is 27 million of its own diameters from its nearest neighbor. If the Sun were a grapefruit in New York City, the nearest star would be another grapefruit in San Francisco. This is typical of stars that are not in the nuclear bulge of a galaxy or inside star clusters. Let’s contrast this with the separation of galaxies.
The visible disk of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. We have three satellite galaxies that are just one or two Milky Way diameters away from us (and will probably someday collide with us). The closest major spiral is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), about 2.4 million light-years away. If the Milky Way were a pancake at one end of a big breakfast table, M31 would be another pancake at the other end of the same table. Our nearest large galaxy neighbor is only 24 of our Galaxy’s diameters from us, and it will begin to crash into the Milky Way in about 3 billion years.
Galaxies in rich clusters are even closer together than those in our neighborhood (see The Distribution of Galaxies in Space ). Thus, the chances of galaxies colliding are far greater than the chances of stars in the disk of a galaxy colliding. And we should note that the difference between the separation of galaxies and stars also means that when galaxies do collide, their stars almost always pass right by each other like smoke passing through a screen door.
The details of galaxy collisions are complex, and the process can take hundreds of millions of years. Thus, collisions are best simulated on a computer ( [link] ), where astronomers can calculate the slow interactions of stars, and clouds of gas and dust, via gravity. These calculations show that if the collision is slow, the colliding galaxies may coalesce to form a single galaxy.
When two galaxies of equal size are involved in a collision, we call such an interaction a merger (the term applied in the business world to two equal companies that join forces). But small galaxies can also be swallowed by larger ones—a process astronomers have called, with some relish, galactic cannibalism ( [link] ).
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