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…
