Collisions. On a human scale they're violent, leaving chaos and destruction in their wake. The bigger the collision, the greater the havoc. But once we leave earth and head out into the universe and beyond, the scale of the collisions grows inconceivably. Galaxies smash into each other, black holes fuse in a deadly fireworks display. Even our own galaxy marches toward a clash with its closest neighbor, Andromeda. These violent interactions astronomers believe spur on the evolution of It's not just the gradual study of evolution that leads to the events that we see and that shapes the nature of the cosmos that we live in, but it's also the occasional violent collisions between two galaxies, between two black holes, between two stars.our universe.In order for something to have gone right in our universe things had to go very wrong.How do we know of these violent collisions, and what do they mean for us here on earth? Technology allows us to witness destruction beyond our wildest dreams, and to learn what these impacts do to the universe. Each type of galactic collision has expanded our understanding and changed our expectations of how the universe works. The largest collision imaginable occurs between the universe's most massive objects, galaxies. A galactic collision conjures images of unparalleled destruction, stars collide, planets are shattered, all life forms are annihilated. But is this really what happens when galaxies collide?
