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Astronomers Witness Whopper Galaxy Collision
Raver32 writes "A major cosmic pileup involving four large galaxies could give rise to one of the largest galaxies the universe has ever known, scientists say.
Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars.
The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way.
"When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe," said study team member Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, gives scientists their first real glimpse into a galaxy merger involving multiple big galaxies.
"Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing together," Rines said. "What we have here is like four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.""
"When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe,"
Kind of like if Walmart, Target, Sears, and the DoD merged?
One wonders what the galactic lawyers will get out of this.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
is Ted Turner screaming, "Giant mergers are a bad idea! Stop! Stop!"
Galactic Mergers and Acquisitions! And have I got a guilt-edged proposition for you, boy!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
How do they *know* its galaxies colliding?
It may just as easily (and appears to my untrained eye) to be more like a star system than a super super colliding galaxy.
Also, they might have a bit of grit on the camera lens, its always a bugger when you take a pic of your grandmother and get colliding galaxies, happens all the time.
liqbase
Okay, that's twice as many races for the Arisians and the Eddorians to play the Great Game of Civilisation in.
So a galaxy is not like a series of tubes, it is like a truck? Fascinating insight there.
We need to stop galaxies from forming a monopoly on being the only galaxy in the universe now, while there's still time. If we sit back and let these galaxies continue merging, it will be too late!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
So, how long is this going to take? What happens when the black holes at the center of each one collide? And, if as we say yesterday, they are really worm holes, what will that imply? Will the wormholes be the 4-way stop of the galaxy?
Layne
Can we call this new Mega-verse, Hell?
God's gotta have plenty of room for all you.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
Considering humans loose grasp of space. i.e. between atoms, between stars, etc. Can it really be called a "collision"?
"When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe, ..."
If the universie in infinite, then there are an infinite number of galaxies that are even bigger.
Nope. Read again, more closely.
Astronomers Witness Whopper Galaxy Collision
The implication is that Burger King intends to merge with Dairy Queen and will be introducing its line of BK burgers at DQ. Honestly.
"Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars. The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way."
4 galaxies the size of the Milky way create something 10 times bigger? Either the galaxies are much larger than the Milky Way or the result is not 10 times bigger...maybe only 4 times bigger?
Four galaxies enter. One galaxy leaves.
...the new-formed galaxy will be named:
BEOWULF!
Eugh, that's going to make my job a PR nightmare. Now our transportation system is going to have up to ten times more vehicles on it than before. Normally we'd just expand, but there will be up to ten times as many obstacles. I didn't want it to come to this, but now we're going to need to demolish entire planets to make room for the new Interstellar Bypass.
Shouldn't that be "One of the biggest in the known Universe"?
will this start to see this happening during our lifetime, or has it already? And I'm refering to us being able to see it, not when it actually happens.
And the truck analogy brings so many bad puns to mind, honking to pass, galactic traffic cops, etc...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Our solar system isn't native to the milky way.
http://www.viewzone.com/milkyway.html
Deleted
I thought that galaxys where all moving away from each other. How did these manage to colide?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
So this leads me to wonder, will a merger of this size cause a larger gravitational force as 4 swirling masses converge. I would expect that if these 4 galaxies can converge and stabalize, that the gravitational force would be pretty immense.
We've learned about Black Holes in the middle of galaxies, can you imagine the size of a the black hole this merger could form?
Would this draw other galaxies closer to the newly merged one, ever increasing the size of the merged one?
Sure these might appear to be wild questions, but I'd sure love to be around to watch it all unfold.
I guess it's forming the Voltron of Galaxies.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
So when four galaxies collide, they make a huge super-galaxy...
Now is that how they make those monster trucks?
There was no kaboom! There is supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
is more than 1 Milky Way of stars.
I really can't see how 1+1+1+3-1 ~ 10 (unless it's for sufficiently small values of 10, or we're using base-4 or -5 arithmetic)...
"Whopper Galaxy Collision" - This should be great slogan for Burger King to counter McDonalds "Billions and Billions serverd".
Consider the amount of stars and the room between them. It's quite unlikely that many stars will actually "collide". Although it's fairly certain that due to gravity some will lose or gain a few planets and debris, some will start moving in a very different way around the center and so on. We'll certainly get a lot of "spill" from gravity desasters, but I don't really think that there will be many head-on collisions of entire stars or systems.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But what does this mean for the Milk Dud Nebula??
No, RTFA... It's like a hamburger.
I hope neither galaxy is admitting culpability and have got those witnesses names and addresses.
Now, when someone can show me some live footage of two stars crashing into each other and a really big explosion, then I'll be impressed. Something far enough away so I can actually see it all happening, but not so far that it looks like a few grains of sand crashing into each other.
The other thing that keeps me getting excited about this stuff is when something REALLY COOL is going to happen, and then they say. "It will be in the very near future, realativly, in the next 5 million years."
I got more out of the banner ads for self aiming telescopes in the $400-$500 range. I never was good at aiming my old telescope. I could find the moon, but not anything smaller.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Supposed to be infinitely small and all that.
Deleted
Wasted a modpoint on the parent, eh?
This was debunked by badastronomy.com. (Or at least that article is a bad argument for it.)
Geez, have none of you llamas ever used the simulator found in xscreensaver. As the four galaxies approach each other stars will sling shot off into space, one galaxy stealing a few. End results: a big galaxy, 3 small unstable with less stars galaxies. :P
Move along, people - nothing to see here...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The astronomer quoted in that link has specifically stated that his work was misrepresented; see here and here. The Sun's orbit in the galaxy indicates that it did indeed originate in the Milky Way.
When should i get out the popcorn???
and subtending a disk. The brightness is redshifted, so distance is "known" but even if the disk was merely the diffraction disk of a single object, at that distance the object would have to be millions of billions of times brighter than any known star. Or made up of millions of billions of ordinary stars (a galaxy).
You have to infer a lot and the link doesn't really show it. You have to take the distance on-spec, for example.
Well, in some cases, astronomy is an order of magnitude science. As this collections of objects doesn't seem to have any gravitational lensing associated with it, there is no way to independently determine the mass of the system. A rough guess at the mass can be determined by assuming a mass to light radio since we know how bright it is (and presumably how far). That would lead to the mass estimates.
Yes, because obviously when a couple of small cars collide it takes place over a few hundred thousand light years and lasts for a million years or so (the warranty on the airbag may be voided).
And this one is like trucks smashing together?
I am now firmly of the view that astronomers:
How about "This in no way whatsoever resembles any kind of collision you have ever witnessed on Earth, it dwarfs your imagination, and by the way any kind of anthropocentric comparison should have been buried with Galileo?"
Pining for the fjords
I thought the biggest galaxy was that one that covered about thirty degrees of the night sky all around, yet was invisible to naked eye - whatever happened to that story ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Scientists now have a clear image of the God of the Whopper galaxy.
This sounds like awful news for anyone in or near any of those galaxies. We just had news that scientists had good reason to believe the Earth's own biodiversity is severely affected by nearby galaxies' radiation when we pop up over the plane of the galaxy and lose our shielding. When you add the beams of radiation from central black holes and other sources, and four times as many novas and supernovas in the same volume as usual, it sounds very inhospitable to life. And then think about an Earth like ours with maybe people like us (or some kind of people), safe on a perfect world that met all the requirements for intelligent life, that had its biodiversity nicely culled and grown through oscillation just like ours, just the right radius from the center and never hit by an asteroid except so far back it doesn't matter. Probably their star's path is getting perturbed, sure probably slowly enough they can notice it and maybe do something about it in the 100,000 or million years they have to get somewhere else.. if there is anywhere else safe within 1000 parsecs. If you ever think life sucks, imagine being on a spaceship Earth in a galaxy going to utter hell. Perhaps no life is even being formed in what might (IANAP) be a radiation hell, hope not. Because if there is life there, I feel sorry - no sorry is not the word, horror is more like it - for whomever it is that is getting snuffed. If we ever have a SETI project powerful enough, and telescopes that can make out more than just blobs, maybe we should aim it over there.
It's sorta like this:
Some time ago, we figured out that:
1. All type 1a supernovae are exactly as bright when they blow up, because that's a star going a tiny bit over the Chandrasekhar limit. So basically they're all very nearly exactly the same weight stars, and blow up in the same way. So since seen brighness decays with the square of the distance, you can calculate how far it was when you see one.
2. (Based on 1 too.) The farther something is, the more re-shifted its spectrum will be. Basically the faster it moves. So you can know fairly accurately how far away these 4 are.
And it would have to be a freakin' big star to be _that_ bright at that distance. You're asking for a galaxy sized star.
3. We also know how big a main sequence star can possibly get, and that's only about 120 solar masses, but the closer you get to that limit, the faster it burns and the more unstable it is. The ones over 100 solar masses burn extremely fast and tend to regularly blow up huge chunks of their mass.
At any rate, we know that a star can't possibly be as big as those things at that distance. Even a star with 100 solar masses, won't have 100 times the Sun's volume. Gravity compresses them a bit more. And even 100 times the Sun's volume would be only a bit over 4.5 times the Sun's radius. It's just not even _near_ the size of a galaxy.
Also, in spite of their massive mass and fast burning rate, the hypergiant stars seem to be "capped" in brightness, so they won't get as bright as a whole galaxy anyway.
Also, remember when I said they burn very fast? A hypergiant burns and blows up in 1 to 3 million years, give or take a few. That's about 4 orders of magnitude shorter than our Sun. They just don't live long enough for 4 of them to come anywhere near each other.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
considering that the action is taking place 5 billion light years away ftfa. The news is late by an eternity.
FTA: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope serendipitously spotted the quadruple merger during a routine survey of a distant galaxy cluster, called CL0958+4702, located nearly 5 billion light years away. If you work at NASA and are reading this, feel my scorn. That is all.
No. Galaxies are huge, and these are very far away, so even if they are moving really fast they won't appear to move on a human time scale.
But the cool thing IMHO is that we are literally looking 5 billion years back in time.
Earth hadn't even formed when this collision took place, but we're looking at it right now.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
For anyone who finds space.com as annoying as I do, here is the link to the original story at NASA's Spitzer site.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Lots of aliens are having sex that normally wouldn't. "Grashnar, hold me! I don't want to die a virgin!"
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
can you imagine the size of a the black hole this merger could form?
And they will call it, the Goatse Galaxy!
I wonder if the E.B.E.'s within those galaxies are too consumed with fighting climate change that they fail to realize they're involved with a 'Whopper Galaxy Collision' . . . . Mmm . . . Whopper.
Are you sure those are "gravitational waves" they send out?
3 small galaxies each >=1 Milky Way
1 big galaxy >=3 Milky Ways
big plume "many" Milky Ways
Some fraction of the plume becomes part of the final galaxy, so final galaxy is
(>1)+(>1)+(>1)+(>3) + 0.7 (7) ~= 6-10 Milky Ways
Definitely "astronomer math": i.e., probably not accurate to more than a factor of two
So a set of 4 galaxies can merge faster than the US government will allow XM and Sirius to merge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM/Sirius_merger
WOW! I can't believe God did this just to give us something to talk about for 30 seconds!
For He is Lord,
He is Lord,
He is Lorrrrrrd!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This happpened like, millions of years ago.
Next, please.
From this distance, one vantage point, how can they know for sure this convergence is actually going to "collide" as opposed to just skim past each other? You can't tell how far apart they are in all 3 axii, just 2.
Why doesn't dark matter push them apart?
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
Rupert Murdoch *has* to be involved in this somehow.
// This is not a sig.
Ummm... the tense here is off by a billion years. This merger is already a done deal, if it actually happened at all. We're watching the Tivo-ized version of the event.
Naturally, Bush was on the scene of the accident posing in front of the surviving child stars and blaming American heroism for getting through the crisis.
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
Somehow, someway, Bush will be blamed for this too
we should be against any merger of this size...
and we thought the AOL-Time Warner merge was big...
----------
Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
Wow! I can hardly wait now for it to be complete.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Because they were being driven respectively by:
Paris Hilton
Nicole Richie
Lindsay Lohan
Britney Spears
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Late one night while I was working on my dissertation on polarimetry of active galactic nuclei, I was surprised by Maria, the physics department's delicious young cleaning lady. Her janitorial uniform did little to conceal her large, perky breasts, which were spherical and of uniform density... I'm not sure this is a good idea...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
kill yourself loser
As an enthusiast of GF(2^k) and/or (pun intended) boolean algebra: 1+1+1+1=0. Or not.
Billions of stars and probably billions of planets... I wonder if any of them had intelligent life. I wonder what happened to that life 5 billion years ago when this event started. I wonder if the saw it coming, or if it was a surprise?
When I go to Burning Man every year I often wonder away from the man made lit up items and just go out and observe the sky. It's so amazingly beautiful. The milky way is clearly visible, and every year I'm momentarily overwhelmed by the absolute insignifance of humanity. We are so small in the grandness of our universe. I stand out on that perfectly flat place and realize that I'm a tiny speck on a tiny sphere in a tiny solar system in a smallish Galaxy. It's the loneliest feeling in the world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Gawd, Slashdot is so lame. They hand you a straight line like this and (so far as I can see) not one slashdottie has the wit (and lack of taste) to make the obvious response?
My gawd, Carl, there's gonna be BEELYUNS AND BEELYUNS of stars in there!
Oh, right, Carl's dead. Geeze, does that mean every slashdottie is *that* young? Pathetic. You people give me a pain - no, in the capacitors, not the diodes. Diodes feel no pain, stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
This message was prepared by hand, not by weight. Settling, if any occurs, is all your fault. If you'd paid attention back when they tried to teach you to read you might have understood more of the allusions that just went whizzing past you, with a sound like a deadline this morning.
Support SETI@home
Excuuse me? Four Milkyway sized galixies colliding and creating a 10x super sized galixy? Hmmm. Is all that dark matter going to come to light? Matter creation? energy to mass conversion? A lot of mass needs to be accounted for... Mabye I should just RTFA.
That conclusion is also implicit in the laws of physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. If you extrapolate a finite amount of time into the past, assuming entropy to be finite and increasing, at some point all the energy in the universe was concentrated at a single point in a state of minimum entropy. There is nothing that can precede that point without assuming that the law of entropy does not hold for all time, and thus either the universe must have a finite age, or our most basic understanding of how it works must be incorrect.
The second law of entropy is merely a statistical phenomenon. Given a high-entropy closed volume of gas it is entirely possible that all the gas molecules will spontaneously end up pressed against one wall of the container; it's just incredibly, incredibly unlikely given the huge number of other things that the gas molecules could be doing. There's no special force out there irresistibly pushing everything into a more evenly distributed state, that is just by far the most likely way for a system to evolve.
On the small scale, entropy momentarily decreases all the time: consider an arbitrary volume of intergalactic space containing only two hydrogen atoms, which just happen to be on a collision course. As they come together in one part of our arbitrary volume, the entropy in that volume decreases - the matter contained within it is less evenly distributed. (Of course, from that low-entropy state the volume quickly devolves back into a high-entropy state). Now, the odds of three such hydrogen atoms all coalescing like that are clearly much much lower; the odds of four, far lower still; and so it quickly becomes incredibly, unimaginably improbable to see large systems spontaneously decrease in entropy.
But given infinite tries, everything possible, no matter how improbable, will occur. The odds of getting a googleplex of sixes in a row in a series of d6 rolls is incredibly improbable; but roll that d6 an infinite number of times and it'll happen in there somewhere. Thus, it is not a problem for all the matter in the universe to have been at a minimal entropy state at one time and there have been times before it where the entropy state was higher; it's just that the odds of the universe spontaneously entering that minimal entropy state from a higher entropy one are unimaginably low. But, if time is infinite, then it's to be expected that at some point in that infinite time, such a thing would occur. And if time is infinite in both directions, then after the universe has been blown apart into nothing but dust and light, after all the protons have decayed, and the universe is nothing but a thin, cold soup of quarks and quanta - at some unimaginably distant time beyond even then, the incredibly unlikely will occur again, and somehow or another all that scattered energy will wind up clumped together again in a low-entropy state, which it won't likely stay in for long, thus exploding once more and beginning the long descent into chaos.
And, as you can get the same effect as rolling a die infinite times just by rolling infinite dice at once, so too if space is infinite, then somewhere out there, likely so far away that all our protons will have decayed before the earliest light from it crosses any light ever emitted by anything even remotely known to man, that's happening right now. Another "universe" is being born, another big bang - still technical a part of the same universe as us but so distant that we can completely ignore it forever for all practical purposes, for nothing we know, not even matter as we know it, will be around by the time it interacts with us. So we have a vision of an infinite stormy sea of universes - each big bang like the falling crest of a choppy wave, descending from its improbable low-entropy state into a more "flat" high-entropy state, but sending out energy in all directions as it does so, energy which will eventually contribute to the formation of another wave crest somewhere else, all on a scale so inconceiv
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Sub:Quadruple merger :CL0958+4702, at 5 BLY a sp?Aid=241
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