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 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.