The Milky Way is on a path of destruction. In 5 billion years, it will smash into Andromeda, the biggest spiral galaxy in the neighborhood. The collision will create legions of giant new stars, up our quotient of radiation-spewing supernovas, and feed a lot of matter into the mouths of massive, massive black holes. Beyond that, there are a whole lot of maybes and probablys.

The quest to understand exactly how the bust-up will happen is giving scientists a good excuse to rubberneck elsewhere. Using images from two NASA space telescopes—the Spitzer, which captures infrared, and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which picks up ultraviolet—Lauranne Lanz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and her colleagues are cataloging cosmic train wrecks. The result of their research is more than 50 images of galaxies in different collision states. The collection helps us understand our galaxy’s future by zooming in on crashes past.