Science in Search of a Worldview
2004
Abstract Piet Hut: I am delighted to be here today, and this whole week. I was very happy already on the flight from New York to Delhi because I saw this picture in the newspaper of the very things I study. It’s a photograph, taken with a normal optical telescope, of two colliding galaxies. I am going to show you the same thing happening in my computer simulations of imagined galaxies, but it is nice to see the real thing here. You see a very complicated pattern of light, with two tails of light going out in different directions. We think that these are two galaxies that had a traffic accident. Because of the high speed of the collision, some of the stars were pulled off in these tails. We did not know that these were collisions until thirty years ago. Before that we thought they might be very strange galaxies, perhaps born that way. But thirty years ago, computers began to be fast enough to simulate the history of a collision.