betrothed.

literally, a marriage made in heaven.

two galaxies merged and gave birth to billions and billions of stars, giving astronomers the rarest opportunity to view one of the loveliest images in the known universe. this event occuring once every million years is already too often, as the two galaxies involved in this phenomenon have been moving on collision course towards each other for the past 500 million years.

this gigantic blob of dust and gas that we perceive as beautiful little stars will disperse in 10 million years, and will give rise to globular clusters, or large groups of stars where galaxies like our very own are found.

the milky way is scheduled to clash with its fiance, the andromeda, in 6 billion years.

amazing.

imagine how much more is out there that we can't see or aren't even aware of! stars are time machines whose lights are aged - since it takes years for their sparkle to travel through space before they reach the earth, the skies we see now are pictures of the past. the sun's light and heat, as we see and feel it, have traversed 8 minutes worth of space, and the nearest star after the sun, Alpha Centauri, is two light-years away. when you gaze upon the sky, the Alpha Centauri you see was the Alpha Centauri two tears ago.

the size of the universe is something we can't grasp. i read somewhere that the expansive horizons of the universe is something the human mind cannot muster - and yet, it's still expanding, getting larger and more difficult to understand as the years go by. it's certainly not waiting for us mere mortals to discover its secrets first before making itself more complicated.

i feel so small...