Classification of Galaxies & Galaxy Crash

Welcome to another edition of ask flurgx!

Last time I took to you to the furthers object known to man! In fact that object was a very young galaxy and i promised you that we´d further explore the field of galaxies and the different structures they have.
For now let´s take a look at the word galaxy. The word galaxy actually derives from the Greek word "galaxias" - which literally means "milky". And that´s because the only galaxy know to the Greeks was our own galaxy, the milk way - which looks like a cloudy milky glowing ribbon on the night sky.

---

Indeed our galaxy is a Spiral Galaxy, of which we are part. Our sun together with the 8 planets including Earth is inside the milky way disc. And because the disc is flat we see this glowing ribbon on the sky. In the picture above you can clearly see that in the center of the image there´s also the center of the milky way and therefor this area is much brighter than the edges. So we found our first type a galaxy, a spiral galaxy. Of course we can not see our milky way from above, but we can look at other spiral galaxies in the universe to get an idea of how our milky way might look. Here we go. The 3 galaxies in the pictures above have something in common. They are discy shaped and have a bright center, and from that center the spiral arms spread. We don´t see the spiral arms in the last picture, but we can see that the Sombrero Galaxy is a flat disk, with some dark dusty clouds in it. The same clouds we can see in our milky way.

---

Other appearances of glaxies are elliptical galaxies and irregular galaxies. Let´s look at an elliptical galaxy first. Elliptical galaxies are more like a glow or a shimmer in space, without a clear structure distinguishable. The amount of stars inside elliptical galaxies can vary widely and stars inside of elliptical galaxies are on average much older than stars found in common spiral galaxies. Last but not least let´s take a look at irregular galaxies.
There are ring galaxies Just plain irregular galaxies

And peculiar galaxies

And eventually some more that we haven´t discovered yet.

---

Even though galaxies are often millions of lightyears appart from each other, and the size of the universe being just plain huge there comes a time when galaxies meet in space and even melt with each other. It´s not a collision, like a car accident, it´s more like if you poor two liquids together. Or mix two colored gas clouds. It looks like this.

Even our milky way will melt one day with our neighbouring galaxy the Andromeda. In about 5 billion years. Still time for some coffee.

Hope you enjoyed the show, stay tuned for more quality content!