In 2018, Lisa Harvey-Smith was appointed as the inaugural Australian Women in STEM Ambassador by the Australian Federal Government. Why is the Milky Way blue? Why isn’t a black hole dark? How many stars can you see with your naked eye?* How much hotter are blue stars than red ones?** Humans are the only known astronomers in the universe. When we look up at the night sky, we are linked to our ancestors. Away from city lights, we can see what generations of people before us have wondered at and weaved stories around. But all that will change. The Andromeda Galaxy is rushing towards us at 400,000 kilometres an hour. When Galaxies Collide will guide you to look at the night sky afresh. It peers 5.86 billion years into the future to consider the fate of Earth and its inhabitants. Will the solution be to live in space without a planet to call home? Will one of the other 100 billion planets spawn life? Learn how to watch this space. * 9,000, but only half of that from any given point on Earth. ** 38,000 degrees vs 3,000.

When seamstress Olivia Dirkspin leaves Central City for a three-week holiday, shes looking for a quiet, secluded place to get away from it all. She finds the Due North of Zenith Lodge, a place with no radio and no phone, just the solution. In addition, the advertisement boasts that this location in the wilderness forests of northern Saskatchewan hosts spectacular views of the Northern Lights. But rest and relaxation arent exactly what she receives. Olivia hopes that getting away from the fast pace of the city will help her to re-evaluate her life. Her fifteen-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa, has moved out, leaving Olivia to put her life back together. On her journey to the lodge, she meets the owner, Vincent Randall; she soon discovers they have much in common. And with a host of relatives, friends, and strangers, they become embroiled in an escapade that speaks of both love and heartache. Played out against the serenity of a northern wilderness tourist camp on the shores of a pristine lake, Olivia is able to salvage the pieces of her relationship with her daughter and summon the courage to venture into new relationships.

Like no other telescope ever invented, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us magnificent high resolution views of the gigantic cosmic collisions between galaxies. Hubble's images are snapshots in time and catch the colliding galaxies in different stages of collision. Thanks to a new and amazing set of 60 Hubble images, for the first time these different stages can be put together to form a still-frame movielike montage showing the incredible processes taking place as galaxies collide and merge. The significance of these cosmic encounters reaches far beyond aesthetics. Galaxy mergers may, in fact, be some of the most important processes that shape our universe. Colliding galaxies very likely, hold some of the most important clues to our cosmic past and to our destiny. It now seems clear that the Milky Way is continuously undergoing merging events, some small scale, others on a gigantic scale. And the importance of this process in the lives of galaxies is much greater than what was previously thought.

When our Milky Way merges with the Andromeda Galaxy in 4.75 billion years, Earth will be facing even bigger problems than a cosmic collision. Worlds separated by thousands of light-years are suddenly thrust together in challenges humans have never imagined.

When our Milky Way merges with the Andromeda Galaxy in 4.75 billion years, Earth will be facing even bigger problems than a cosmic collision. Two parallel worlds confront an uncertain future, while an astrophilosopher and a modern shaman struggle with decisions that will establish the fate of intelligent beings throughout the colliding spiral arms. Worlds separated by thousands of light-years are suddenly thrust together in challenges humans have never imagined.

The spectacular images of galaxy collisions capture the imagination. This book will show what is out there in the universe, what it’s like in other galaxies, what they might look like, and how cosmic processes might affect life in other solar systems. It will explain crucial stages in the development of physical structure in the universe, and the effect of galaxy scale processes. Professor Struck will explore all the issues surrounding galaxy collisions. He will begin with a brief broad review of the background on galaxies, the history of their discovery, and how this has been driven by steadily improving technology. Chapters 2 gives details of the early stages of different types of galaxy collision - Rings of Fire, Tidal Swings and Retrograde and Sideways Reels - while Chapter 3 describes collisions between galaxies of very different masses: minor merger or dwarf destruction. Chapter 4 covers ultra-luminous infrared galaxies and major mergers and Chapter 5 briefly examines the techniques used for computer simulation results and how increasing computer capacity has affected the development of this field. The following chapter looks at understanding the physical processes of triggered star formation and nuclear activity. Chapters 7-9 look at the broader view of cosmological structure growth which determines the environment and conditions in which galaxy collisions occur. In the densest environments, this process repeats itself on the larger scale of galaxy clusters. The concluding chapter considers what a galaxy collision looks like from a solar system like ours. Although the galaxy is completely restructured and the night sky view would change greatly over the course of several hundred million years, the direct effects on our planet would be few and infrequent, with only a small probability of being truly catastrophic. These issues will be explored along with the ideas that galaxies must reach a certain evolutionary "maturity" before they can even form solar systems, and that there are habitable zones within galaxies. Thus, galaxy scale processes, like collisions, can determine the fate of life on Earth-like planets.

I remember sitting spellbound, watching the movie When Worlds Collide. Two planets hurled through space toward Earth while scientists and engineers frantically raced to complete a rocket ship that would take them to safety. In the final moments the spaceship lifted off as the occupants watched the Earth bulge, crack, then literally explode as one of the planets struck it. As I left the theater I wondered if it was really possible for another world to collide with Earth. Later I learned that while many catastrophic collisions no doubt occurred early in the his tory of the solar system, today they are exceedingly rare. I was relieved, but in another sense I was disappointed (not that I hoped a collision of this type would actually occur). A collision of two objects in space, say, two stars, I was sure would be a spectacular event. It is quite unlikely, however, that we will ever witness the collision of two stars. The event is just too rare. But collisions of systems of stars-galaxies-oddly enough, are relatively com mon. In fact, we see evidence of several in the sky right now.