This Weird Galaxy Is Creeping Up on Our Milky Way

[Judi Lynn]

This Weird Galaxy Is Creeping Up on Our Milky Way
By Kasandra Brabaw 6 hours ago



A view of the galaxy Messier 90 from the Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is about 60 million light-years from the Milky Way, but it's moving closer(Image: © ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Sargent et al)


A gorgeous new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope depicts Messier 90, a spiral galaxy roughly 60 million light-years away from our own Milky Way — but getting closer.

While the image itself is incredible, even more fascinating is the information astronomers discovered while capturing it. Messier 90 is one of very few galaxies moving toward the Milky Way, according to a statement from Hubble. Scientists are able to tell that the galaxy is coming closer to us because of the light coming from Messier 90.

"The galaxy is compressing the wavelength of its light as it moves towards us, like a slinky being squashed when you push on one end," Hubble representatives said in the statement. On the visible light spectrum, shorter wavelengths appear blue. So, because its light is compressed from our perspective, Messier 90 exhibits a phenomenon called "blueshift," which indicates to scientists that Messier 90 is moving closer to us.

Almost all other galaxies we can observe are moving away from us with the expansion of the universe, according to the Hubble statement. We see their light stretched toward the red end of the visible light spectrum (called redshift).

More:
https://www.space.com/weird-galaxy-creeping-closer.html

[gtar100]

1. One of our crash buddies.

Galaxies seem to come in groups, crashing and merging their black holes and star systems on a time scale we can only imagine and model based on snapshots of other galaxy clusters . This crash with Messier 90 is going to be a big one!

[SCantiGOP]

2. Is "creeping up" the correct terminology?

If I’m creeping up on something I would expect to get there in less than millions/billions of years.