THE COLLISION OF
THE MILKY WAY
AND
ANDROMEDA

Download the printable jpeg file of the poster

Poster caption: In 3 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will likely collide. The two galaxies are shown here a few hundred million years after closest approach with the smaller Milky Way on the bottom. The strong gravitational tides of the interaction excite open spiral arms that develop into sweeping tidal tails and bridges. Eventually, the two galaxies will merge and transform into a single elliptical galaxy. This simulation used more than 300 million particles to represent the stars and dark matter in the two galaxies and was calculated with 512 processors on the parallel supercomputer Mckenzie at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto.

The GRAVITAS DVD comes with the fold-out poster pictured here.  The reverse side contains the DVD liner notes. If you would like a full-resolution copy of the poster without creases you can download the printable jpeg file and have it printed on your own. The default dimensions are about 18"x13" but you can reduce the size to fit on a legal size colour copy.