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March 06, 2007

Milkdromeda

A great episode of Astronomy Cast (which overall is an amazing show, tackling mind-bending subjects in an approachable, understandable way), discussing the Largest Structures In The Universe.  Of note is how, in about 3.5 billion years, the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy:

"So in about three to five billion years, the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy are going to gravitationally fall into one another.credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) As this happens, our dark matter halos are going to hit first, and this is going to send shocks back. These shocks are going to distort the shapes of our spiral arms. Clouds of gas and dust that haven’t yet been used up forming stars are going to light up and start to form new generations of stars in a wild star-forming frenzy.   

As the galaxies fall together, some of the streaming arms, the trailing arms that are behind in the merger are going to get left behind and stretched out, grasping out toward the rest of the local group around us. The cores of the two galaxies are going to fall together and tangle. The supermassive black holes in the centres of the two galaxies are going to light up as gas and dust also falls into the supermassive black holes and we end up with active cores."

But not to worry, it sounds like our sun will have cooked the Earth by that time. 

Man, all the CFLs in the world...

Clampants | March 6, 2007 09:11 AM