Smash-up on the Galactic Interstate.

Four galaxies are crashing into each other in one of the largest collisions ever seen, scientists say.

The galactic crash was spotted by astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected a fan-shaped plume coming from a cluster of galaxies nearly five billion light-years away.

When fully merged, the new galaxy will be up to ten times as large as the Milky Way, astronomers said.

"Most galaxy mergers are like small pickup trucks filled with sand colliding," explained Kenneth Rines, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"This big merger is like four big rigs full of sand colliding and flinging sand everywhere.

In this case, each grain of sand represents an individual star!"

Your "cosmic" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

(With permisssion from; "Encyclopedia Galactica!")