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IYA News

Monthly Feature

During each month of the International Year of Astronomy, we'll highlight some key NASA missions, space science discoveries, and night-sky wonders that you can discover with your own observations and explorations, and we'll connect you to related NASA resources and events.

 

Join us each month of 2009 as we explore:

2009 Topic Celestial Object
January Telescopes and Space Probes: Today's Starry Messengers Venus
February Our Solar System The Moon
March Observing at Night... and in the Day Saturn
April Galaxies and the Distant Universe The Whirlpool Galaxy
May Our Sun The Sun
June Clusters of Stars The Hercules Cluster
July Black Holes Our Galaxy: the Milky Way
August Rocks and Ice in the Solar System Perseids
September Planets and Moons Jupiter
October What is the Fate of the Universe? Andromeda
November The Lives of Stars The Crab Nebula
December Discovering New Worlds The Orion Nebula

Additional News

Additional IYA related News & Events can be found on the official IYA News and Press Releases pages.

Galaxies Collide

Galaxies Collide

Galaxies are in constant motion. Drawn together by their mutual gravitational attraction, collisions can and do happen. This pair of crashing galaxies is called "The Antennae" because the long streamers of stars thrown off early in the collision resemble an insect’s antennae.

Collisions like these last hundreds of millions of years and were probably much more common in the early universe, when galaxies were much closer together.