Cosmic Collisions: The Hubble Atlas of Merging Galaxies

by Lars Lindberg Christensen, Davide de Martin, Raquel Yumi Shida

Like no other telescope ever invented, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us magnificent high resolution views of the gigantic cosmic collisions between galaxies. Hubble's images are snapshots in time and catch the colliding galaxies in different stages of collision. Thanks to a new and amazing set of 60 Hubble images, for the first time these different stages can be put together to form a still-frame movielike montage showing the incredible processes taking place as galaxies collide and merge. The significance of these cosmic encounters reaches far beyond aesthetics. Galaxy mergers may, in fact, be some of the most important processes that shape our universe. Colliding galaxies very likely, hold some of the most important clues to our cosmic past and to our destiny. It now seems clear that the Milky Way is continuously undergoing merging events, some small scale, others on a gigantic scale. And the importance of this process in the lives of galaxies is much greater than what was previously thought.

Genres: Physics, Astronomy

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Lars Lindberg Christensen is an author and a science communication specialist heading the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre (HEIC) group in Munich, Germany where he is responsible for public outreach and education for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in Europe at the European Southern Observatory (ESO/ST-ECF).

-Wikipedia

Reviews

[Nick Black]

5 stars for pictures, 1 star for text. I think this was pitched at the six-to-eight-year-old cohort, so I'm likely being a bit ungracious with that latter. Then again, I refuse to give more than a star to a book which begins every page with an italicized, 18pt direct excerpt from the page's text.