by More than a decade ago, scientists predicted that our Milky Way would collide galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda in four billion years, which led to a “revision” of our solar system.
This is now unlikely – at least in the expected time frame.
“We see that external galaxies often collide and merge with other galaxies, which sometimes produce the equivalent of cosmic fireworks when gas is driven into the middle of the merger rest, feeds a central black hole that spends an enormous amount of radiation before it falls into the hole,” explained the professor professor from Durham University, the freenkloloss.
“Until now we thought this was the fate that was waiting for our Milky Way,” he said in a explanation. “We now know that there is a very good chance that we can avoid this scary fate.”
Earlier studies by NASA astronomers had shown that the collision with our closest neighboring Galaxy would push the sun into a new region of the room, although the earth would not be destroyed. The stars would be sent to different orbits. Currently, the galaxies approach each other at a speed of approximately 62 miles per second.
After 100,000 simulations of both galaxies based on the latest observation data from the NASA Hubble and the GAIA Space Telescopes of the European Space Agency, the authors of the study published in the magazine Natural astronomy found only a probability of 2 percent that the Milky Way and Andromeda would crash into one another over the next five billion years.
In more than half of the scenarios, the galaxies experienced at least one close encounter before they have lost enough orbital energy to collide and merge. However, this would happen in around eight to 10 billion years. At this point, the sun may have burned out when it goes out of hydrogen and consumes the earth.
In most other cases, however, the galaxies happen without incidents, although there is space for uncertainty.
In addition, the authors claim that earlier studies are not wrong, but that they were able to include more variables in their simulations.
“While some previous work focused on the interaction between the Milky Way, Andromeda and the Triangulum galaxy, we also included the effect of the great Magellan cloud,” said the leading author Dr. Till Sawala from the University of Helsinki. The cloud is a dwarf galaxy that circles the Milky Way. “Although its mass is only about 15 percent of the Milky Ways, his gravitational procession disturbs the movement of the Milky Way perpetrators with Andromeda to significantly reduce the likelihood of a merger with the Andromeda galaxy.”
However, the authors want to update their results with new data. The European space agency’s GAIA world space telescope will soon provide more precise measurements of crucial factors in the galaxies, including Andromeda’s movement. Nevertheless, Frenk said that the results were a “certificate” for the power of large supercomputers.
“When I see the results of our calculations, I am amazed that we are able to simulate the development of gigantic collections of stars over billions of years with such a precision and find out their ultimate fate,” he added.
