To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, the folks at NASA have released the largest single collection of images ever to the public, all about cosmic collisions.
 
In its 18 years of viewing the heavens from its Earth orbit, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 840,000 observations and snapped more than 540,000 images of 27,000 celestial objects. Today, 59 of those collision photographs have been made public and are available here.

Galactic collisions, assumed to have occurred more frequently before galactic expansion lengthened the distances between neighboring stellar bodies, create new structures of intricate detail, according to the release from Hubblesite.org.

 

The colliding of galaxies isn't only something that happens in faraway places, says the space, science and tech site Redorbit.com.  They say our Milky Way Galaxy is now absorbing the Sagitarrius dwarf elliptical galaxy, and is about to be taken over by the Andromeda Galaxy; the two are said to be rushing toward each other at 500,000 km per hour.

Astronomers using Hubble data over the 18 years since its launch have published more than 7,500 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built, despite negative publicity about the telescope over the years. In 2007 scientists published more than 700 journal articles on Hubble telescope data.

A shuttle repair crew is expected to visit the telescope later this year, hopefully extending its life until 2013, when it's scheduled to be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope.