Big Pic: Dwarf Galaxy Collides With Big Spiral Galaxy KABOOM Ha Ha Ha!
Two Galaxies Colliding X-ray: NASA/CXC/Huntingdon Inst. for X-ray Astronomy/G.Garmire, Optical: ESO/VLT NASA noticed a cloud of six-million-degree gas and was like, what? (We're paraphrasing.) NASA's Chandra x-ray observatory picked up something odd and powerful in a galaxy far, far away: an event almost like a sonic boom that triggered an enormous release of superheated gas. NASA thinks the boom was caused by something we've never seen before: the collision of a dwarf galaxy with a much larger spiral galaxy. (Note: there's no sound in space, this collision did not actually make a "KABOOM" noise, we know, we know.) Chandra's telescopes picked up the heat before anything else; that cloud of superheated gas is around six million degrees Fahrenheit, so "superheated" is, if anything, an understatement. Then scientists began putting the puzzle pieces together. The gas formed a comet-like shape, indicating the motion of the dwarf galaxy as it collided with the larger...