what would happen if 2 galaxies collide that were both made of matter?

Question

what type of shockwave would this create

Answer 1

Dear bumpercar,

Very intresting question...

The correct answer is that nobody really knows what exactly would happen if two galaxies were to collide. However, we can speculate that the resulting impact would be so devastating that the universe(s) surrounding the event would be completely obliterated.

How do we know this?

We don’t, but we do know that when a mere two stars collide they can form a black hole, which in essense is a big ball of matter so dense that light itself cannot escape the depth of its bottomless vacuum. To get an idea of the type of gravimetric force it would take to suck light in, a teaspoon of the matter from a black hole would weigh more than the planet earth.

Multiply the force that it would take to generate a black hole by 10^100 and you've got the resulting shockwave of a collision on a galactic scale.

Answer 2

It happens all the time! Or at least, sufficiently often that there are beautiful pictures on the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) web-site, more technically the site of the STSci - the Space Telescope Science institute's web-site. Just Yahoo! the latter.

What happens depends upon a variety of circumstances, including the types of galaxy you started with, how old they were (which involves how much gas has not yet turned into stars, how "head-on" the collision is, etc.

STARS themselves are so small compared to the interstellar distances that stars in a really rapidly moving galaxy could just pass right through another one. At slower speeds, the original motions of the stars in their individual galaxies will be more disturbed. Some of the most beautiful pictures of interacting galaxiesn(the "Tadpole" galaxy pair, for example) came about through near-misses of a comparable pair of galaxies at a speed only slighly more than eacg galaxy's individual internal motions.

Meanwhile, there's more of a problem for GIANT INTERSTELLAR GAS CLOUDS. THEY can bump into one another, creating shockwaves, as you suggest. One consequence is that an innocent gas cloud, simply doing it sown thing beforehand, can be shocked into producing a sudden wave of star formation. We call those "starburst galaxies." These were only first discovered a few decades ago, but now they are turning up all over the place!

The universe is indeed spectacularly beautiful AND dynamic, as modern astrophysics has shown over and over again.

"When Worlds Collide" is no longer a Hollywood fantasy --- out there in deepest space, "When Galaxies Collide" seems to be how a lot of stars, and indeed elliptical galaxies in particular, seem to come about.

Live long and prosper.

Answer 3

The space between the stars is so great that the galaxies pretty much "pass through" one another, as gravity reworks the whole assmbly into a new larger galaxy. The Hubble telescope has found galaxies in collision where that is happening. It is not like a massive "star crash"" at all.

Answer 4

Astronomers have discovered at the center of our galaxy and many others, are supermassive black holes, with 3 million times the mass of our star. We are not sure what role the black hole plays in the formation of the galaxy (whether the galaxy forms as a result of the black hole, or whether the black hole forms as a result of the galaxy), but it appears that when galaxies collide, the larger black hole engulfs the smaller one, and steals it from the other galaxy. Again, we aren't sure of the implications of that because we aren't sure the role that the black hole plays for the galaxy.

Answer 5

the shock wave will trigger a star burst while the two galaxies will pass right through each other with minimal star collisions.

now if one of the galaxies were made of antimatter they ll annihilate each other in a huge explosion.

Answer 6

Define matter?