Will we survive the collision with Andromeda?
Andromeda–Milky Way collision
The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA.
Astronomers estimate that 3.75 billion years from now, Earth will be caught up amid the largest galactic event in our planet's history, when these two giant galaxies collide. Luckily, experts think that Earth will survive, but it won't be entirely unaffected.
Our Milky Way is on a collision course with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda. Today Andromeda is visible as a speck of light in the night sky, but about 5 billion years from now, it will be tangled up with us. Our galaxy's spiral arms will disappear, and so will our supermassive black hole.
"I think it's unlikely the Earth will be physically destroyed by the collision with Andromeda," Mackey said. "It's not out of the question, but in general the stars in galaxies are spaced sufficiently sparsely that direct collisions between stars are rare.
The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group—the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy.
Can the Andromeda Galaxy support life? Since we can't yet say for certain whether there are any other stars in our own galaxy that host life, it is even harder to say whether there might be life, or at least the conditions for life, in another galaxy.
Scientists suppose that in about four billion years the star formation will stop, which is almost just a blink of an eye in the life cycle of the universe. The Milky Way is dying and we don't know why. There are many ways to kill a galaxy, so what is killing the Milky Way?
In other words, it's extremely unlikely that life on any planet can survive the death of its sun — but new life could spring from the ashes of the old once that sun shrivels up and turns off its violent winds.
Radiation from gamma ray bursts may render the rest uninhabitable. The universe may be a lonelier place than previously thought. Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction.
Where is our galaxy headed?
The Andromeda galaxy is currently racing toward our Milky Way at a speed of about 70 miles (113 km) per second. With this in mind, our merger will occur five billion years from now.
To reach M31, the Andromeda galaxy, in a human lifetime would require a velocity of 0.99999 c. Behind the relativistic spacecraft on Earth, millions of years would have passed, but the same crew that departed would reach their destination.
Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years. Scientists have scoured the Earth searching for the oldest rocks to radiometrically date. In northwestern Canada, they discovered rocks about 4.03 billion years old.
The night sky could look like this in about 4 billion years, when the Andromeda Galaxy is expected to collide with our own Milky Way.
The Andromeda Galaxy, which is far larger than the Milky Way, is hurtling toward us at 68 miles per second. And while that might seem fast, given the distance between these galaxies it will still take 4 billion years for them to collide.
So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre. We'd need to go much further to escape the 'halo' of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way's stellar disk.
It's Space Day, but traveling the vast entity that is space would take far longer than a single day. The nearest galaxy: 749,000,000 (that's 749 million) years. The end of the known universe: 225,000,000,000,000 years (that's 225 trillion) years.
To escape the gravitational clutches of our galaxy, a spaceship would need to zoom out of our solar system and hit 537 kilometres per second. For context, a rocket needs to roar off at just 11.2 kilometres per second to escape Earth's gravity. Conventional rocket engines would never make it.
The Hubble Space Telescope has found not one or two, but as many as 6 galaxies that are dead, as far as their role of birthing stars is concerned. The Hubble Telescope was looking back in time to a period when the universe was some 3 billion years old.
In 2009, the first planet may have been discovered in the Andromeda Galaxy. This was detected using a technique called microlensing, which is caused by the deflection of light by a massive object.
Does Andromeda have a black hole?
Astronomers confirm intermediate-mass black hole in Andromeda galaxy. Astronomers at the University of Utah have confirmed an intermediate-mass black hole, an elusive rarity long sought by scientists. The object is hidden in B023-G078, a star cluster in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy.
By time 100 billion years have passed, we will have settled down into a quiet, old elliptical galaxy, where star formation is very rare, and practically all the stars left in the night sky are very cool, red, low-mass dwarf stars.
Astronomers believe that our own Milky Way galaxy is approximately 13.6 billion years old. The newest galaxy we know of formed only about 500 million years ago.
SETTING NEW RECORDS, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest known galaxy known to the universe and humankind. Caught and snapped in the cosmos, the GLASS-z13 galaxy was formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, which struck 13.8 billion years ago.
But even without such dramatic doomsday scenarios, astronomical forces will eventually render the planet uninhabitable. Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone," new research indicates.
Scientists are still debating whether or not our planet will be engulfed, or whether it will orbit dangerously close to the red giant sun. Either way, life as we know it on Earth will cease to exist. In fact, surface life on our planet will likely be wiped out long before the sun turns into a red giant.
Once all the helium disappears, the forces of gravity will take over, and the sun will shrink into a white dwarf. All the outer material will dissipate, leaving behind a planetary nebula.
Then, just last year, scientists discovered another Earth-like planet orbiting one of our closest neighboring stars, Proxima Centauri. Currently, this planet is the best candidate we have for supporting human life.
Yet Earth remains a standout, and so far, one of a kind. Of the thousands of exoplanets – planets around other stars – confirmed by our increasingly powerful telescopes, and despite extensive probing of the solar system, ours is still the only planet known to host life.
Venus and Mars are the most like Earth, but in different ways. In terms of size, average density, mass, and surface gravity, Venus is very similar to Earth. But Mars is the planet that is most similar to Earth in other ways.
Is anything faster than light?
So, according to de Rham, the only thing capable of traveling faster than the speed of light is, somewhat paradoxically, light itself, though only when not in the vacuum of space. Of note, regardless of the medium, light will never exceed its maximum speed of 186,282 miles per second.
It would take 500 years to travel 500 light-year distance at the speed of light.
Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraled neighbor, Andromeda. The galaxies as we know them will not survive.
Answer: Yes, the Sun - in fact, our whole solar system - orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!
At first, awesome though it was, the painstakingly produced image of the ring of light around our galaxy's central pit of darkness seemed to merely prove what experts already expected: The Milky Way's supermassive black hole exists, it is spinning, and it obeys Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
That became the consensus. Astrophysicists Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020 for discovering that stars in the Milky Way's galactic center were moving in a pattern consistent with orbits around a supermassive black hole.
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human.
Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, hom*o erectus, which means 'upright man' in Latin. hom*o erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.
Scientists have recently observed for the first time that, on an epigenetic level, astronauts age more slowly during long-term simulated space travel than they would have if their feet had been planted on Planet Earth.
Will humans survive the galaxy collision?
Luckily, experts think that Earth will survive, but it won't be entirely unaffected. The collision will unfold right in front of us, changing the night sky to look like nothing any human has seen before.
"I think it's unlikely the Earth will be physically destroyed by the collision with Andromeda," Mackey said. "It's not out of the question, but in general the stars in galaxies are spaced sufficiently sparsely that direct collisions between stars are rare.
Andromeda–Milky Way collision
The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA.
The result of the collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way will be a new, larger galaxy, but rather than being a spiral like its forebears, this new system ends up as a giant elliptical. The authors of the paper in question have named this new galaxy 'Milkdromeda'.
22 billion years in the future is the earliest possible end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario, assuming a model of dark energy with w = −1.5. False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs field is metastable.
During a galactic collision, the supermassive black holes located at the center of both galaxies will eventually merge together and become a single, much larger black hole. The collision of two supermassive black holes generates gravitational waves that move outwards.
Eventually, these three galaxies' black holes might fall into each other's orbits, like circling a drain, until they merge together to form one enormous black hole at the center of an enormous new galaxy. That process can take billions of years.
A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 143.
In a galaxy collision, large galaxies absorb smaller galaxies entirely, tearing them apart and incorporating their stars. But when the galaxies are similar in size – like the Milky Way and Andromeda – the close encounter destroys the spiral structure entirely.
"Black holes form inside their host galaxies and grow inproportion to them, forming an accretion disc which will eventually destroy thehost," he added.
How will the Milky Way end?
Two billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda, our closest neighboring galaxy, will begin to fuse into one giant football-shaped galaxy.
made up of about 1 trillion stars. You can see the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye on a clear night with no moon, even in places with a little light pollution. It has an apparent magnitude of 3.44.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole.
There are about 8 other dwarf galaxies close to the Milky Way that will at some time merge with it. And in a very long time from now, the Milky Way will collide and merge with the Andromeda galaxy, which is a galaxy very similar to ours. The result of that collision should be a large elliptical galaxy.
| Triangulum Galaxy | |
|---|---|
| Distance (comoving) | 970 kpc (3.2 Mly) |
| Apparent magnitude (V) | 5.72 |
| Characteristics | |
| Type | SA(s)cd |
There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
The gravitational force is causing our home galaxy to twist and deform. According to astronomers, the Milky Way galaxy is being slowly twisted and deformed by the gravitational force of a neighbouring satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
The universe is expanding, with every galaxy beyond the Local Group speeding away from us. Today, most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light. All galaxies currently beyond 18 billion light-years are forever unreachable by us, no matter how much time passes.
