Wow. Just... Wow.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Rines (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)

NASA's Spitzer Spies Monster Galaxy Pileup

"Four galaxies are slamming into each other and kicking up billions of stars in one of the largest cosmic smash-ups ever observed.

The clashing galaxies, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will eventually merge into a single, behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. This rare sighting provides an unprecedented look at how the most massive galaxies in the universe form.

'Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing together,' said Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. 'What we have here is like four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.' Rines is lead author of a new paper accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters."

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'Fantastic Four' Galaxies

"This artist's concept shows what the night sky might look like from a hypothetical planet around a star tossed out of an ongoing four-way collision between big galaxies (yellow blobs). NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted this 'quadruple merger' of galaxies within a larger cluster of galaxies located nearly 5 billion light-years away.

Though the galaxies appear intact, gravitational disturbances have caused them to stretch and twist, flinging billions of stars into space -- nearly three times as many stars as are in our Milky Way galaxy. The tossed stars are visible in the large plume emanating from the central, largest galaxy. If any of these stars have planets, their night skies would be filled with the monstrous merger, along with other galaxies in the cluster (smaller, bluish blobs)."

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)