So are we headed toward each other or not? When massive galaxies collide they fling stars and gas everywhere, distort each other into fantastic and weird shapes, and then eventually merge into a single, much larger galaxy.
For example, if the two big members orbit each other in a circle, always staying the same distance away from each other, then the group will pretty much stay the same over time.īut if instead the two are headed right for each other, on a head-on collision course, that will change the structure of the group on a huge scale. Because Andromeda and the Milky Way are the beefiest they dominate the gravity and therefore the future of the group. The Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way are the two biggest galaxies in what we call the Local Group, a collection of several dozen galaxies large and small all held together by their own gravity. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) Photo: The magnificent Andromeda Galaxy along with its companion M32 (upper left of center). The bizarre thing is that, while all these measurements seem to contradict each other, in fact at some level they all agree with one another! The problem here is statistical uncertainty in the measurements, because the numbers involved are very small and extremely difficult to determine. If true, it's possible that Andromeda could miss the Milky Way entirely on this pass.
THIS WILD LIFE NO MORE BAD DAYS UPDATE
In 2019, an update to the measurements indicated that Andromeda was sliding to the side a little bit more than previously thought, delaying the inevitable collision by about 600 million years.īut now new results have been published using updated data, and they imply that Andromeda's sideways motion still higher yet. They predicted that in about 4 billion years the two galaxies would collide, and chaos would ensue. In 2012, astronomers announced a startling result: The had used Hubble to very carefully measure the motion of the Andromeda galaxy, and found that it appeared to heading very nearly directly toward the Milky Way at 100 kilometers per second.
0 kommentar(er)
