And even stars are “born”.

In other news, there was a city council meeting recently, in which one member, talking about how parking tickets seem to disappear without ever being paid, spoke of them “disappearing into a black hole”.

Another councilman, black, instantly arose to voice his indignation, and demanded an immediate apology.

I put that down to the sad state of science education today. Probably more accurately, over the last 20 years, which is when the offended councilman went through school.

Comparing a car collision with a galaxy collision: the thing is, we see the one in real time; the other takes rather longer. If we could see the other played out in a matter of seconds, we might appreciate the effect. I think there are in fact computer simulations of such things.

Fascinating subject. The anthropomorphizing aspect is easy to understand and others have said it. We relate to galaxies as living things because they move and change. We relate human characteristics, feeling and emotions to things that move and change because that’s our experience and because it helps us to (think we) understand the reasons things happen.

However, I think the language and the words we choose absolutely give us insight into our prejudices and preferences. That is, we say spirals are destroyed because we think spirals are better. I would suggest that if ellipticals evolved into spirals we would use words like that: evolved. We wouldn’t say the ellipticals were destroyed to make the spirals. It gets back to what we would prefer to have. Using Vagueofgodalming’s example of planet formation, we don’t say that planetesimals are “eaten” to make a planet. Rather we say they were “swept up.” Hey, we’re just tidying up here… making the solar system neat and orderly.

Still I wonder if anyone would notice if we changed the language and started using different words.

What if galaxy collisions were marriages? Depending on your point of view (and perhaps personal experience) that might be considered a much nicer union.

What if the newcomer joined the neighborhood rather than slammed into the cluster?

What if galactic gas was “cleaned out” of the incoming galaxy instead of stripped?

Maybe a red elliptical galaxies are “calm and quiet”, instead of dead.

Gee Pamela, maybe you could start a trend or even a language. Hey, if quarks can be called charm, surely galaxies can get married…

I’ve been wondering how that is known.

I know that spectroscopy tells us that light from Andromeda is blueshifted, so we know the radial component of Andromeda’s motion is toward rather than away from us. However, how can we know that the sideways motion is too small to have the Andromeda & Milky Way galaxies miss each other?

I propose calling it a shivastic event. Since the Hindu belief in Shiva as both the creator and destroyer of the universe makes for such a metaphorical analogy.

Whether something is destructive or creative depends on where you want to end up, and galaxies don’t want anything. They just are.

So as far as a human perspective is concerned, the universe IS literally deadly, dangerous and violent… but that’s not to say that deadly, dangerous violent things can’t be majestic or awesome… on a smaller scale, Tornadoes, Volcanoes, Tsunamis, they all invoke the same sense of awe to a lesser degree.

What I think we have problems comprehending (and this is where our negative associations with violence come in and ruin that majestic truth) is that there’s no REASON for these events, no maliciousness or anger behind the violence, no intent to cause harm… just the universe getting on with itself.
With our constant humanicentric desire to see the intent of a mind in everything, our variously believed gods and creation stories, it’s no wonder such a hostile universe can seem violent and cruelly aimed at us, instead of violent and awesomely sweeping us along.