As per the article linked by septimus above, of more concern to our distant ancestors than our sun colliding with another star is the chance of getting fried by intense x-ray emissions from colliding gas clouds in the two galaxies, or an increase in supernova formation. Better have lots of sun screen ready.
Well, the Earth will have been rendered uninhabitable long before then, so no worries.
That’s gonna be some dope shit to watch from heaven.
Nah, we got that covered.
I’ll bookmark the thread to bump it with an update.
I prefer “AndroMilkyda” as both more mellifluous and a better recognition of the relative hugeness of Andromeda compared to our little galaxy.
Say that I load a bunch of magnets into an array of PVC pipe airguns. One magnet per pipe. I know shoot all of the airguns at once. Most likely, the magnets will attract each other in the air and land in clumps.
If you think of the big bang as something like a grenade, with tiny bits of shrapnel that are a degree or two off from one another in heading, then yeah, it might seem implausible that they’d attract one another. But space is really fricking big and the particles that were ejected by the Big Bang were really small and really finely distributed.
It’s like if you measured the angle of all of the light beams hitting the Earth from the Sun. You’d find that they were all so parallel that it’s difficult to believe that they actually aren’t. It’s not that the Sun isn’t radiating light in all directions, it’s that the particles are so small, there are so many of them, the distance is so great, and we’re so small, that it all ends up seeming like the light rays are all parallel to one another.
The magnets that are shot out of your PVC pipe have an easy time clumping, again, because they’re being ejected parallel to one another.
Andromeda and the Milky Way are so tiny and they’ve traveled so far that, by the standards of the Big Bang and the Universe, they’re in parallel transit. No difficulty for them to attract one another.
Descendants.
Our Galaxy isn’t little. It’s actually a fair bit above average in size, for a spiral galaxy. Though yes, the Andromeda galaxy is even larger.
As an aside, a pet peeve of mine: “Andromeda” is a constellation, a region of the sky as seen from Earth containing stars in which the ancients imagined a picture. “The Andromeda Galaxy”, also called M31, is a galaxy which, as seen from Earth, happens to be in that region of the sky. Pedantic, I know, but it bugs me when people refer to the galaxy as just “Andromeda”.
There was a recent report that someone had found stars beyond the edge of the galaxy in the galactic plane. IIRC, some these were twice the distance from the center as the nominal edge was. So going by that, the galaxy is much larger than it was previously thought. This does not surprise me. The edge of the galaxy, like the edges of the solar system and atmosphere, is not likely to be a sharp boundary, but gradually tapers off.
But that will also be true of other galaxies, including M31. It’s virtually certain there are stars beyond its edge that we can’t see.
At any rate, like most astronomical objects, the mass of galaxies is much more important than their size. And this discovery doesn’t change the mass significantly.
This is a super cool picture and makes me wonder if Andromeda would had been made up as a God like the sun and moon to ancient peoples. While the sun and moon “move through the sky” Andromeda would just sit there. Staring at us. And judging us. Which makes me wonder how religions might have shaken out and how that may have changed history and our current societies and cultures.
Eh, I don’t think any southern cultures ever deified the Magellanic Clouds.
You don’t think, or you don’t know?
Because visually the image I am talking about and the one you are are very different.
Here is the one I am talking about where Andromeda is at least 3-4 times bigger than the moon:
And the one you are talking about, from one of the most generous images I could find, from where they are just bright patches in the sky.
The Andromeda Galaxy is about six times as wide as the Moon as seen from the Earth:
Well, here it is a few [del]billion years[/del] months later and it’s time for an update. No doubt many of you have seen Phil Plait’s blog about a refinement in the calculation on when the big collision will occur.
Many will be happy to note that we’ve gotten a reprieve of some 600 million years. It’s not going to happen until 4.6 billion years from now. Or maybe you’ll be disappointed that you won’t see the fireworks until that much longer. Whatever, but check back in a year or so from now and the calc may be refined even more.
BTW, note that M33, the Triangulum Galaxy is not actually in orbit around Andromeda. Doesn’t surprise me. Galaxies in general have only been in existence (at least in something like their current form) for about 10-12 billion years. That’s about the same order of magnitude as their orbital periods assuming they’re in orbit. Which means they really haven’t had time to orbit each other very much, if they actually are in orbit. Much more likely is that nearby galaxies throughout the universe are all on their first approach to each other and are mostly destined to collide sooner or later.
And then the Eddorians will take over the whole shebang.
Well heck. I’ve been waiting outside, guess I’ll go back inside for now. Keep us updated.
Just time for a cup of tea, I guess…
Why do so many people make this mistake? The word you meant is “descendant.”
Will there be many stars still around by that time? Won’t the Sun be near to dying at that point?
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