A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one travelling at two million miles per hour (mph) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes.
The aurora in early October followed by the appearance of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS the following week had me thinking about the rare events we observe in astronomy.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy, just a tenth of the Milky Way’s mass. It is about 160,000 light years away, which is remarkably close in cosmic terms. In the southern hemisphere it spans ...