Andromeda
is headed our way at around 120km/second and is predicted to collide
with the Milky Way galaxy in three or four billion years. The result, if
anybody is around to see it, will be beautiful. As there's so much
empty space and such large distances between stars, the two galaxies
will pass through each other first and it's very unlikely any stars will
collide, but dust and clouds will, meaning the rate of star creation
will be greatly boosted and supernovae will become more common.
This
is the first footage ever captured of a deep-sea squid battling an
owlfish - and it's mind blowing. Collected by the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Research Institute, the video shows a black-eyed squid snaring an
owlfish with its two hook-tipped tentacles and using its sharp beak to
gnaw away at the owlfish's spinal cord, rotating it like a cob of corn
until it severs the cord, rendering the owlfish helpless and ready to be
eaten.
Would you like to become a diamond? A Swiss
company is making diamonds out of cremated human remains. The process
reduces ash to carbon and then applies intense heat and pressure for
weeks to create diamond crystals. Once these have cooled off, they’re
cut to shape and engraved. ‘Human diamonds’ tend to have a blue
colouration due to the amount of boron present in the human body.
Astronomers have confirmed that the dwarf
planet Ceres - the largest body in the asteroid belt that sits between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - is generating plumes of water vapour.
Thought to be caused by cryovolcanoes, which spew water instead of
molten rocks, these plumes could explain how so much water made it to
the early Earth.
Astronomers
have observed one of the most powerful black holes in the known
Universe. Located in a galaxy cluster around 3.9 billion lights years
from Earth, the black hole has created two enormous cavities (shown as
two dark spaces in the bright purple X-ray glow) in the hot gas
surrounding it and stopped trillions of stars from forming.
