Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have captured new images with the VLT telescope of the result of a spectacular cosmic collision: the galaxy NGC 7727. This giant was born from the merger of two galaxies in an event that began about a billion years ago. And that seems to be the ultimate goal that awaits the Milky Way as well..

We must remember that the galaxy that hosts our world is traveling together with its cosmic neighbor Andromeda on a collision course that will cause them to merge into a single galactic kingdom in billions of years. While we won’t be there to contemplate the “show,” the new images of NGC 7727, said to be the most accurate yet to observe the phenomenon, predict what the future impact might be.

NGC 7727 is a singular galaxy formed by the collision of two other galaxies and contains the nearest pair of supermassive black holes found to date. Dangerously close to each other on a cosmological scale, they will inevitably end up merging into a single, even more massive one.

NGC 7727 is located 89 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. It is visible with amateur telescopes and appears as a faint swirl of stardust from Earth’s perspective. It is thought to be the result of two different (probably elliptical) galaxies merging into one, just like Andromeda and the Milky Way.

These galaxies had their own black holes, which merged to form two huge voids located at the center of one of the two bright cores of NGC 7727. They are “only” 1,600 light-years away (very close on a cosmic scale) and they are on a collision course, doomed to collide and merge into a giant black hole within 250 million years. When this happens, the collision vibrates waves through the fabric of space and time, creating an enormous gravitational force simply incomprehensible to the human mind.

Astronomers explain that the galaxies “dance” around each other, with gravity creating tidal forces that drastically change the appearance of the dancing pairs. “Tails” of stars, gas and dust swirl around the galaxies, eventually forming a new merger, resulting in the beautifully curved, chaotic shape seen in NGC 7727. The effects of this cosmic bulge are spectacularly visible in images captured by the VLT, in the following closer look at its black holes.

This process is predicted to repeat itself with the Milky Way in the distant future. We know that our galaxy has its own supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A, and Andromeda is thought to have one of intermediate size as well. The inevitable merger of galaxies will cause a pair of supermassive black holes like those in NGC 7727, also sentenced to crash. This will be galactic level after all.