Milky Way To Collide With Andromeda Galaxy!!!
I certainly hope that the President is preparing for this!
SPACE.com – Simulating the Fate of Our Milky Way
The galaxies are separated by about 2.2 million light years (one light-year is about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers). That gap is closing at about 310,000 miles per hour (500,000 kph).
“Even if the galaxies have a wider passage on the first pass, if they are on a bound orbit they are destined to merge eventually,” Dubinski said. “If not on the first flyby, then within the second or third pass over the next 10 billion years, he added.
The clincher is gravity. Even if there’s enough space between the Milky Way and Andromeda to simply brush past each other at spiral arm’s length, their mutual gravity will ultimately win out, drawing the two galaxies together on successive flybys.
Our Future: A simulation of what might happen when the Andromeda Galaxy hits ours shows tidal forces of gravity creating long plumes of material. The central regions will relatively quickly fall back together and merge into a single remnant galaxy.
Dubinski hopes to refine his model of the collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies in the future by modeling a system of about a trillion or so particles to match the number of stars in the two galaxies. But with the current growth in computer memory and speed, such computations won’t be possible for about 10 years, he said.
UPDATE: This, apparently, will DESTROY the Earth!!!
Note: I was being sarcastic about Bush preparing for this… It’s a really cool article. Read it…
And just think, all this destruction is caused by people who use aerosol underarm deodorant… Oops, i’m showing my age aren’t i? I forget — it’s not underarm deodorant users anymore, it’s people driving SUV’s. They’re going to kill us all!!!!
The Whistler said, I thought the sun was going to go Nova in about 4 million years.
Make that billion.
The Whistler:
Actually a nova is a sudden, short-lived brightening of a star, usually associated with the ejection of of material. Another type of nova is when a small dense star that is part of a binary pair “swallows” a clump of matter from its companion star (causing a very large explosion).
A supernova is just a nova where most of the material of the star gets ejected.
I thought the sun was going to go Nova in about 4 million years.
Somebody tell Algore that a Nova is not always a car. With how well his TV network is doing it’s probably what he’s driving.
Well, the sun expands to fill our orbit before colapsing into a white dwarf… I don’t think it goes nova, though…
While some think this is Karl Rove in action, it’s actually Dick Cheney. Halliburont will get the contract to clean up the galaxy after the collision.
I think we have to define short lived when it comes to sellar evolution.
I would imagine the Nova period lasts a good number of years.
If I recall correctly what’ll happen is that the Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen to fuse into helium. The sun begins to collapse under it’s own weight without the energy of fusion to counter gravity.
When the sun collapses to a certain point the pressure grows until it sets off the helium to fuse with itself (creating lithium?). This fusion is very energetic and it will cause the sun to expand out beyond the Earths orbit. That could be bad for us.
I just wanted to show I knew something about it since I committed such a boneheaded million-billion what’s the difference mistake.
I’d hate to see the traffic jam trying to escape that disaster.
Ah… I had thought that “Nova” was a blast or mass ejection of solar material that didn’t stop moving. I can see I was wrong.
Oddly, the definition for “Supernova” is the same…
Or Halliburton even.
Ummm expanding to fill our orbit is going NOVA.
A supernova is when it blows up.