Quote:
Originally Posted by Placidus
That would be one heavy piece of computation. Not on your iPhone.  My belief (can't quickly find a reference) is that it's not the stars that collide, it's the gas between the stars. The compression of the interstellar gas triggers the spectacular new star formation that you can see in parts of the Antennae. |
You’re most definitely correct! Galaxy mergers cause extreme star formation rates in both galaxies due to the concussive forces on gaseous regions. Supernova cause localised star formation to increase where as galaxy collisions cause galaxy wide star formation.
What I did was a true back of the envelope calculation. I took the rough area of space within two galaxies, the average amount of stars with an average size and calculated the amount of space required for a potential collision.
That’s what I did from memory, it was a procrastination hour from writing about stellar evolutions within globular clusters some 7 years ago haha