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Andromeda On Collision Course With the Milky Way

Posted by samzenpus on from the demolition-galaxy dept.

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.'"

2 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Watch video of simulation of this collision by gupg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    NVIDIA showed a simulation of this collision running on their latest Tesla GPGPU based on the "Kepler" architecture

    Starts at around 1:00 on this video with a great explanation of the collision itself.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aByz-mxOXJM&feature=relmfu

    Sumit
    (NVIDIA employee)

  2. Imagine by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Imagine how awesome the sky would look once Andromeda is near enough to dominate the view.

    Imagine how awesome the sky would look with two galaxies, one of them much larger than our own, sprawling around it.

    Imagine how such a view might affect the belief systems and cultures of all the advanced life forms that might be able to perceive it.

    Hopefully, I will be there, billions of years in the future, and be able to experience it.