Ground-breaking collision of 14 galaxies detected

A ground-breaking collision of about 14 galaxies was recently detected that is about to happen and will form a massive galaxy.

Imaged almost at the boundary of observable Universe, about 12.4 billion light-years-away from Earth, astronomers detected a pile-up of 14 unusually bright objects close together and heading for a massive collision that will eventually form one massive galaxy.

However, what’s interesting is this happened over 12 billion years ago. As explained by BBC, looking this far across the Universe means the light has taken that many billions of years to reach us and its essentially looking back in time. Though for those on Earth, this collision has not yet happened but considering the situation at those galaxies today, this collision must have grown massively and might be one of the largest structures in the cosmos, wrote Sky News.

Researchers simulate the formation of Universe

The unusual phenomenon was initially detected during a wide sky survey via the South Pole Telescope. “We found it originally as a bright point source in the survey. I don’t think we were expecting something quite this spectacular but we knew it had to be exciting,” expressed Tim Miller, an author on the study published in Nature.

The region occupied by this galaxy group in space is almost four to five times the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, due to which, the galaxies are incredibly dense. Different scientists and astronomers from the world have regarded the discovery as ‘extreme one’ and ‘ground-breaking’.