Slashdot Mirror
Andromeda On Collision Course With the Milky Way
ananyo writes "From the Nature story: 'The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies. Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.'"
I thought parsecs was a unit of time though? So 770,000 parsecs is about 4 billion years?
So 12 parsecs is about 20 hours?
can't we launch a mission to deflect it ? !
This may not be news to you, but I'm thankful to know so I could cancel my tickets to The Book Of Mormon while they're still refundable.
Well, just in time to warn our Great^12 Grandchildren.
Maybe we could embed the message in some giant, black humming monolith, or something...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That's where I keep all my stuff!
Yep, it was written in Java.
The first billion went while they were waiting for Eclipse to open.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."