In 4 billion years our galaxy will collide with Andromeda; NASA created this animation of what the c

[soothsayer]

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Universal-Sci
@universal_sci
In 4 billion years our galaxy will collide with Andromeda; NASA created this animation of what the collision and merger will look like

[PJMcK]

1. I love it!

A couple of thoughts occur to me. First, in real time, the collision of the two galaxies will take place over millions of years. This animation, while really cool, (I like the little galaxy that skirts by!), is time elapsed.

The second thing that I've read numerous times is that the space between the stars in both galaxies is so great that there probably won't be too many collisions of stars. Space is really that big.

[soothsayer]

3. Yeah, space is big and all kinds of forces would be at work...

In the slow motion merger

[SCantiGOP]

7. I've read that the chance of star collisions

Would be less than randomly firing a gun from one end zone of a football field, and hitting a one inch square target on a 100 foot high wall at the other end zone. A lot of space between each star.

[Warpy]

13. The Sun will be heating up by then

and most life on Earth will likely be underground or moving there quickly, following the remaining water.

Stellar and planetary collisions will be rare, but they will happen, especially as close misses will perturb orbits. I just wonder what sort of a show two colliding supermassive black holes will put on when they're so close.

[NEOBuckeye]

20. Less time than that.

The sun will be running low on fuel and moving towards becoming a Red Giant in 4 billion years, but its luminosity is gradually increasing now. Earth will be mostly sterile in a billion years because the Sun will be 10% brighter, and water in the surface will have vaporized due to the greenhouse effect it causes. Most complex life will be gone in half that time, unless humans or our descendants last long enough to embrace geo-engineering.

The Solar system may last long enough to be part of the Milkdromeda galaxy, but it will be close to its own demise at that point, at least from how we know it now.

[speak easy]

37. I normally don't have time for geo-engineering,

but if the Sun is 10% brighter, a series of space mirrors would hold off that outcome, and we have that technology today.

[krispos42]

38. I believe when the sun cools and expands...

... into a red giant we'll nearly be within the surface of the star. In other words, cooked.

[LiberalArkie]

22. Nah,... The Earth would have invested everything in building a device that destroys the Milky Way

[Buckeye_Democrat]

26. LOL! You probably have the closest prediction to reality!

Whenever I read about extremely hypothetical ideas, like devices that warp space to allow faster space travel, I also imagine the nefarious applications of those ideas.

People warping space to make other people and objects vanish into temporary black holes, or who knows what!

And I'm amazed that I've never heard of a comic book villain who had control of space-time in such ways, but I suppose that's just too much power for the "good guys" to overcome.

[barrski49]

25. GRREEEAATTT

I put my lawn chair in the backyard and I'm waiting for the big event!!!

[gopiscrap]

43. welcome to DU

[WHITT]

2. So

I have to calculate how far in advance to get out of the stock market.

[soothsayer]

5. No no, figure what to buy INTO

[JohnnyRingo]

29. I'd hold off a few billion years

Then short everything.

[MuseRider]

4. Cool!

I am glad I will be gone by then! LOL.

[PJMcK]

6. Really?

It will be an astronomical show of the highest order. Of course, it will take millions of years for the merged galaxy to stabilize but the nighttime sky will be awesome.

Unfortunately, Earth will no longer exist since our sun will have expanded into a red giant before the merger and engulfed our little planet.

Still, the deep space photos we have of merging galaxies are just awesome.

[MuseRider]

8. Yeah,

I am 67 years old. There is no way I am going to live for 4 billion more years.

[PJMcK]

10. I right behind you at 63

I actually don't want to live that long!

[MuseRider]

11. Gotcha

me too.

I hope there is music somewhere where we end up. Or nothing, I can accept that but if there is something there had better be good music! And goats....

[COL Mustard]

53. I Hope There's Rum!

[soothsayer]

15. We don't know what long term effects these vaccines have

You might be alive!

[MuseRider]

16. Oh god no!

Please. I am already crepey at 67. At 100 I will be dragging my saggy skin around in a bucket!

[alfredo]

59. You will have a built in swiffer

[Random Boomer]

61. Everything hurts now....

I'm 67 too and feeling especially old today. My lower back hurts, my hips hurts, one eye is red, and I'm feeling blah. If this is an average day for me now, I shudder how I'll feel if I make it to 80, much less 100.

[mjvpi]

62. I'm working on a new theory of gravity.

As I age I realize that there is no way that it is consistent. It sounds as if you are having bad gravity day.

All kidding aside, science is wonderful. This story is perfect illustration of my on going relationship with a power greater than myself. Religions are so limiting when confronted with just this this pinch of the infinite. I don’t mean to offend. Sorry if I did.

[Random Boomer]

63. No offense meant nor taken. n/t

[cstanleytech]

18. Under certain conditions I would not mind just to see and enjoy it

and the many other changes to come.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. I have discussed this with My Son The Astronomer any number of times.

He tells me that the current thinking is that no more than ten stars will actually collide when this happens. However, a lot more will be gravitionally interacting with each other.

And that the black holes in the center of each will eventually merge.

Astronomers already know that our galaxy has already absorbed some other galaxies because every so often there's a group of stars traveling in a different direction from the stars around them.

Another interesting fact. Eventually all the galaxies in our local cluster will join up and form one very giant galaxy. By that time, thanks to the expansion of the universe, all other galaxies will be so far away, they will no longer be visible; their light will not reach us. This will be many billions, perhaps trillions of years down the road. But what that will mean is that astronomers in the distant future will have no way of knowing that there is anything else in the universe besides their one enormous galaxy, and will have no way of figuring out how old the universe is. Kind of a scary thought.

[smb]

19. Reminds Me Of This Quote

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life -- a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation, for we knew the universe when it was young.

--Arthur C. Clarke

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

21. "Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life."

How true. The universe is not yet 14 billion years old. My Son The Astronomer tells me that a lot of current thinking in astronomy is that, given how young the universe really is, we may well be the very first intelligent species to have arisen. So the notion that there surely must be any number of advanced species out there may well be wrong.

[airplaneman]

41. Ok there we go again

"given how young the universe really is" "The universe is not yet 14 billion years old"

versus

Dr. Jason Wright
"May 8, 2015 — After all, the Universe is very old, as are the galaxies that inhabit it"

I vote for 13.7 Billion years old as very old

-airplane

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

42. Given that the Universe will go on for trillions of years,

13.7 billion years is very young. Very, very young.

Oh, and if I Google Dr. Jason Wright, all I find is a gynecologist. Hardly an expert on cosmology and the age of the Universe.

So I'm going to go with what My Son The Astronomer tells me.

And actually, the galaxies that are currently in the Universe are relatively young. All the earliest stars have long since died out. Our sun and solar system are less than 5 billion years old.

[airplaneman]

44. Just to prove I am not imaging things

Watch this you will be glad you did

Dr Wright talks in this

&t=280s

-Airplane

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

45. One minute in he's claiming life on other planets.

Pure speculation. I'm not sure I want to watch another 22 minutes of that.

My Son The Astronomer is an exoplanet researcher. While several thousand exoplanets have already been found, so far we have not found the signature of life on any of them. Hopefully that will change as our tools improve.

[airplaneman]

46. Dr Wright is probably the most famous exoplanet discoverer. I wont say any more. N/T.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

47. I do see he's at Penn State, which is possibly the foremost school for exoplanet research.

My Son The Astronomer has attended a conference or two there. He also attended one in Switzerland I think in 2019, and one in Cambridge, England the year before, so no doubt he knows Dr. Wright. Nice.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

48. My Son The Astronomer does know him, although not well, as MSTA is not at Wright's level.

He did just tell me that Wright is doing some work on looking for technosignatures.

[COL Mustard]

54. Do You Think They'll Find Intelligent Life Before Then?

https://m.

[getagrip_already]

58. meh, a guy on the internet said it's only 4800 y.o.

So you must be wrong. Oh, and the earth is flat so we don't know what's underneath us.

[JohnnyRingo]

30. Clarke is a great writer and an optimist

The galaxy should be flush with intelligent life, but where is it? It's sad that we may be as technologically advanced as a civilization gets before we destroy ourselves through war or depletion of resources, and let's not forget the Robot Apocalypse LOL. Not hard to imagine.

Astrobiologists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and William Bains, reviewing the history of life on Earth, including convergent evolution, concluded that transitions such as oxygenic photosynthesis, the eukaryotic cell, multicellularity, and tool-using intelligence are likely to occur on any Earth-like planet given enough time. They argue that the Great Filter may be abiogenesis, the rise of technological human-level intelligence, or an inability to settle other worlds because of self-destruction or a lack of resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[lunatica]

51. I love Arthur C Clark!

[soothsayer]

23. Except... maybe quantum mechanics is right

A core tenet of quantum mechanics, the study of particle behavior on the subatomic level, is this: If you know the current state of any system, then you know everything there is to know about its past and its future.

[LudwigPastorius]

24. Before the distant galaxies recede, never to be seen again,...

the amount of stars we see will increase until we reach the future visibility limit.

This article talks a bit about that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/05/how-much-of-the-unobservable-universe-will-we-someday-be-able-to-see/?sh=5bdba24bf827

It also lays out the stunning fact that everything we can see, as far as we can see, is a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire universe.

The future visibility limit will take us to distances that are presently 61 billion light-years away, but no farther. It will reveal slightly more than twice the volume of the Universe we can observe today. The unobservable Universe, on the other hand, must be at least 23 trillion light years in diameter, and contain a volume of space that's over 15 million times as large as the volume we can observe.

[MFM008]

14. Good

Ill be waiting.

[Harker]

17. Can't wait.

Think I'll enjoy a few beers.

[malthaussen]

27. Then what's the point of going on? It will be all over soon... n/t

[JohnnyRingo]

28. Carl Sagan explained in Cosmos why stars don't collide.

He said that if you could shrink our galaxy to the size of an orange, the nearest galaxy would be about five feet away. But if you shrunk our sun to the size of an orange, the nearest star would be about 400 miles away.

I wrote that from memory, but it's close to accurate. Puts a real perspective on how small we are in the universe and the incredible vastness of it.

Thanx for posting. I really enjoyed that.

[NNadir]

31. I don't know about you, but I'm stockpiling extra toilet paper. In a galactic collision...

...shortages are sure to arise.

[DFW]

32. So am I

Canned goods, too. Not too much in the way of propane tanks, though. During a galactic collision, I don't imagine that finding heat sources will be too much of an issue.

[NNadir]

33. Good point. I suggest stocking up on sun tan lotion. n/t.

[DFW]

34. You're right. I should.

Last edited Fri Mar 26, 2021, 07:35 AM - Edit history (1)

Do you a place that sells SPF 8,000,000? I looked online, and couldn't find one anywhere.

[Dan]

55. I'm hiding in my crawl space!

[keithbvadu2]

35. No hurry! I'm a patient kind of guy. I can wait.

No hurry! I'm a patient kind of guy. I can wait.

[Martin68]

36. Thanks for the heads up. My wife and I will start preparing for this catastrophe now.

First, buy more guns!

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

39. The third galaxy in this animation is M-33

AKA the Triangulum Galaxy or NGC 598.

[byronius]

57. Thanks for that! I was wondering.

[birdographer]

40. I'll set some popcorn aside

Don't want to run out before the big event.

[Stardust]

49. Great thread, I enjoyed it so much❣️Thank you, soothsayer. n/t

[soothsayer]

50. Your name checks out

You’re welcome!

[COL Mustard]

52. Oh Great. My Homeowners Policy Will Go Up Again

[marble falls]

56. Glad I upgraded my home insurance.

[TexasTowelie]

60. I'll be shampooing what remains of my hair that night. nt