It's hard to imagine that in the depths of space there can be a collision. The two interacting galaxies can create pockets of intense star formation when they collide. Astronomers can spot the slow process of merging because they can see it as it happens.
One such merger has been captured by NOIRLab's Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. The two are just 20,000 light-years apart and are about to enter a phase of merging.
The two galaxies are 60 million light-years away from each other and have the same shape and size. As they get closer and closer, the enormous forces involved in the merger will begin to distort their shapes, stretching out parts and triggering bursts of star formation.
NOIRLab writes that the dueling gravity of the two stars will cause them to form intense stellar formations and distort their once-majestic structures. Over millions of years, the galaxies will continually swing past each other in ever-tight loops, drawing out long streamers of stars and gas until their individual structures are so thoroughly mixed that a single, essentially spherical, galaxy emerges from the chaos. The gas and dust in this system will be used up or destroyed by that point.
NOIRLab points out that this is similar to what will happen when the nearby Andromeda galaxy collides with our home galaxy in around 4 billion years.
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