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Unruly Milky Way

Posted by michael on from the settle-down-class dept.

empaler writes "Space.com is running a story about the movement history of the local group near our solar system. The belief until now has been that after an initial period of chaos in our galaxy, it had since 'been rather calm'. 'But this turns out not to be true. Stars have been perturbed all the time throughout the Milky Way history.'"

3 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Plotting Ahead? by glen604 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since they seem to be able to trace the route of the Sun (and other stars) going back several million years, I would imagine they could also likewise figure out where everything is going (to a certain extent).. Sooo..I wonder if any stars are going to come closer to the Sun- ie within a visitable timeframe.

    ok, yeah, one can always hope :)

    1. Re:Plotting Ahead? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      And yet, oddly, people still occasionally get a hole in one at the golf course.

      Stars do collide - I'm sure quite frequently given the number of them. It's just a question of how likely it is to happen to any one particular star - ie: ours.

  2. Extrapolations by dan42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems too fantastic to me that they can extrapolate the data more than 7 orders of magnitude into the past (15 years into 250 million years). At this extreme, usually the error terms and list of assumptions swamp the usefullness of the projections.
    They imply they are measuring the change in both relative position and brightness of the stars. From their conclusion and simulation showing that stars appear closer now (than from 15 years ago), I guess this means the change in relative brightness was the dominating statistic in the extrapolations. I seem to remember that this is very difficult to measure accurately, let alone precisely - especially with land-based telescopes.