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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.'"
Oh, you got me to click on the story. Got me again, you ad-whoring editors!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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 ? !
Stop Panicking!!! This is no time to panic... Though if you do panic try to hold on to that feeling because it is the proper response to being told that your galaxy is on a collision course with another galaxy.
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)
It's an odd coincidence that it starts to happen around the time our sun goes red giant. Not that anything resembling Homo Sapiens would be around. 5 billion years ago we hadn't made it up to the level of bacteria yet. Impossible to say what Earth life would be like by then if it survived that long. Odds are all life would be wiped out well before we go red giant. Even another billion years from now conditions will be quite harsh. Too bad because in 7 billion years we'd have a very interesting sky.
It's been known for a long time that Andromeda had a velocity towards the Milky Way (easily measured by its blue-shift), but no one could tell what its lateral velocity was, therefore whether it was going to actually collide or whether it was in an eccentric orbit. Actually measuring such a tiny side-shift, against more distant galaxies, of a source which is not actually a single defined object, where every part of it is in separate motion, in just 8 years, is pretty fucking impressive.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
That's where I keep all my stuff!
The approach velocity is pretty low as astronomical speeds go - 187.5 m/s or 675 km/h (a bit under 420mph, for people who want non-metric numbers).
So is it actually a collision that we're headed for, or is someone with horrible depth perception trying to dock? :-)
Andomeda will be on collision corse with the Milky Way throughout the whole history of mankind. It's just a blink of an eye for the universe.
Typical. Some riffraff shows up in the neighborhood and instantly everyone panics and moves to the suburbs.
Anyone have the number for those SpaceX guys? I'm thinking of going early to avoid the rush.
You think maybe the Kelvans are behind this?
#DeleteChrome
AAAAHHHHHHHHHH! *pause for breath* AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
But don't worry!!! Like all good movies only the USA will be affected...
Where do I get discount coupon?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
...is that it will attract the Eddorians.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
...time to grab my towel.
Make sure you have at least 4 days of food and water on hand.
They gravitate towards each other. If their "ejection angle" was close enough for them to be flying mostly-parallel they would eventually pull into each other.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Isn't our sun expected to turn into a red giant in around the same timeframe? 4 billion years or so from now doesn't seem like it's going to be a good time for us!
(wiping sweat from brow)
I thought for a moment that TFA said 4 million years.
Hey, 4 billion is a long time. No need to panic.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Does this mean I can kill myself now?
"That's right...I said it."
If we still depend on the Sun in 4 billion years, we're screwed anyway. Maybe we could've burried deep underground or something, shielded from the heat and toxic atmosphere, but we need to become a lot more mobile if we intend to live on as a species (not that it's likely to be the same species as it is today).
We are all God's parents.
Andromeda / Star Trek crossover, about time.
Wow, so we live in the Perseus galaxy and Andromeda really does have a rock chained to her (the M33 galaxy). Oh yeah, and for those who think I'm speaking nonsense:
Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess from Greek mythology who, as divine punishment for her mother's bragging, the Boast of Cassiopeia, was chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster. She was saved from death by Perseus, her future husband (Wikipedia).
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
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.
Isolated clusters of galaxies (such as the local group) are expected to have low total angular momentum (basically because the initial condition has low angular momentum, and in the absence of large mass anisotropy nearby, there is nothing to change this.) The mass of the local group is dominated by Andromeda and us, and hence so is the angular momentum. If the us/Andromeda pair has low angular momentum about their centre of mass (and given the pair is gravitationally bound), they will both pass close to that centre of mass - i.e., they will collide.
Of course, having an actual measurment is much more satisfying than having a theory.
Also - although they can be spectacular from outside, galactic collisions aren't expected to have bad results for life living on their planets. The biggest effect is that colliding dust clouds trigger a burst of star formation, so the night sky will be pretty.
It has been a few decades since I studied this, so I hope this is all accurate.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'm not going to be concerned until I see the Pierson's Puppeteer fleet going by in the other direction.
The diameter of the sun is 1e9 meters. The distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 4e16m (40 lightyears)...Let's put that in context:
Suppose the sun is the size of a grain of sand, say 1mm (1e-3mm), the distance to the nearest grain of sand is 40 kilometer. So a collision between galaxies is basically collision between empty spaces...
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
How come nobody's mentioned Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series yet? Doesn't anyone here read SF?
The fact that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will eventually collide is the motivation of the Inhibitors.
At last, mankind will have a convenient and cheap way of intergalactic travel: Wait for it to come to us.
That's only true if it can't change course.
I find the whole concept of Andromeda colliding with the Milkyway smashing!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Oh Yay, more bad Sci-Fi with Kevin Sorbo....
Why cant they let that whole show just die?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Note from the future: Ironically that was the same year the members of the United States Congress finally stopped their partisan political bickering.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Everyone PANIC!
I hate having to re-arrange my schedule like this.
The photos we get from our space telescopes will be so much sharper as things get closer!
Unfortunately, we won't even be here as a species in a million years. We'll either have died out, or long since left the planet, Earth won't even be remembered as a story told to children. And that's assuming we could even recognize ourselves after some period of evolution.
Personally, I'm betting on the died-out version. Our civilization has limited energy resources, and limited vision for the future. Once the oil runs out, enough chaos ensues to assure destruction of the species.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Andromeda on Collision Course With the Milky Way
I knew Kevin Sorbo couldn't drive.
Under the Republicans we are turning so far to the right that we could easily miss it.
So will the name of the new conglomoration be the Milky Andromeda?
These corporate mergers are getting too big and out of hand! This must stop. Pretty soon there will be no competition and Milkomeda will be the only game in town. Travel outside of Milkomeda and your iPhone will be a dead brick.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, that's great. Like we didn't already have enough trouble with our economy. It's going to be a hard sell keeping business in the US when all of the Milky Way and possibly humanity is doomed in 4 billion years. What does President Obama intend to do about this?
OK, so if all matter came into being 14 Billion years ago in the big bang, and all space and the matter in it has been expanding since then, and new research shows that the universe will likely keep expanding as opposed to collapsing back in upon itself, how are two galaxies with the same approximate mass supposed to collide? Shouldn't we be getting further apart? I guess relatively close bodies of matter will continue to migrate towards each other even as the larger body of matter continues to expand, so matter will eventually be in larger clumps with more open space between them, but it still seems a bit counter-intuitive.
Keep passing the open windows...
That's because the propulsion unit in the Millenium Falcon folded space
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.