To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the launch of Hubble, the Space Telescope Science Institute released 59 images of galaxies colliding. Rather than the staid and immutable image that galaxies have had in textbooks these images paint a remarkable picture of whirling, colliding, flirtatious galaxies that are crashing into each other or cozying up to produce new mega galaxies.

Although only one in a million of the galaxies closest to us are interacting, galaxies much further away (the light we are getting from them is billions of years old) are caught "in the act" more often. This is because there were more galactic collisions in the early universe, so looking farther away (which is also farther into the past) will increase your chances of seeing galaxies collide.

There is also a – video that shows what might happen when our galaxy runs into our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda and runs through the stages that the the images represent.

The video release shows how of the 59 different images released today, some are galaxies about to collide, some are after their first collision and some are after they have already collided with each other once and are swinging around about to hit a second time. Some are in the same plane, some are at a 90 degree angle to each other. Since there are so many, we are able to piece together a time line of how these collisions (which can take place over a billion years) play out.

The Hubble is scheduled to be serviced by a Space Shuttle mission this August and is expected to keep producing its famous deep space images through 2013 when its replacement the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to launch. As wikipedia puts it:

The JWST will be far superior to Hubble for many astronomical research programs, but will only observe in infrared, so it will not replace Hubble's ability to observe in the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

You can read more about the planned servicing mission here.

Image collection [HubbleSite]

Video: Hubble Gives Glimpse of Milky Ways Future [HubbleSite]

See Also:

Photo montage courtesy of NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)