Brendan Umill snapped a photo that quickly became an internet sensation. No wonder, because he captured the collision of two galaxies.
What is the collision of two galaxies? Photo by Brendan O’Mel gives an idea of this. The filming quickly went viral and reached millions of people around the world.
Picture of two galaxies colliding
The photographer used the telescope to photograph something known as the ARP271. These two spiral galaxies – NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 – collide between them. It is located about 130 million light-years from Earth, which means that this event happened 130 million years ago, because that’s how long it took the light to reach Brendan’s telescope.
Tweet embed Galaxy 2 collided 130 million light-years away #astronomy #Photography #Void #fyp シ ♬ Interstellar (main theme) – random piano
The photo has been viewed on Twitter nearly 10 million times. It generated 1.8 million likes and over 15 thousand. comments. Thanks to him, many people realized what light years are and how space observation works.
If you don’t know, remember that light years are a unit of distance, not time (though years are in the name). A light year is equal to the distance light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year (about 365.25 days). For this reason, in the case of the image above, we are seeing the events of 130 million years ago. It’s almost like a trip through time.
research: This is the center of our galaxy. History is written before our eyes
research: Scientists have observed a cosmic monster as powerful as billions of suns
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Text source: TweakTown
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