Galaxy-eater: NASA photo shows entire galaxy being consumed

Space is awesome.

Prepare to have your horizons expanded.

This is a galaxy smashing into another galaxy, consuming it, merging with it, and adding its stars and planets to its own - captured by NASA's super-powerful X-Ray telescopes and amateurs on the ground.

That's a week-old photo of M51, a whirlpool galaxy 25-30 million light years away, taken with a NASA X-Ray telescope at the Chandra Observatory, where the merging of the two galaxies can be clearly seen.

X-Rays only show a tiny part of the spectrum, so it was merged with regular telescope images from amateur astronomers.

Even better - this is an example of exactly what will happen to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in the distant future.

In a few billion years, our galaxy will collide with its closest neighbour, Andromeda - because the laws of gravity apply to entire galaxies too.

This mathematical certainty was recently covered by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's series "Cosmos", in a segment called "Dance of Half a Trillion Stars". It's god damn beautiful.

Don't worry, though - the stars are so far apart from one another that it's very unlikely any would thump into each other. And we'll be long gone - or evolved into something entirely different.

Isn't the universe wonderful?

Images from NASA and the Chandra Observatory on Flickr. Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Cosmos" is currently airing on Fox TV in the US.