Andromeda-Milky Way Galaxy Smash-Up May Not Happen As Soon As Expected

Here is good news: our galaxy may not be intended to end with an ardent collision with Andromeda’s galaxy as soon as it thought. While previous research considered collision as a virtual certainty in the five or six billion years, new research in question.

Andromeda’s galaxy, a spiral galaxy also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is one of the many galaxies, including the Milky Way, which includes what is known as the local group. Astronomers have long since known that Andromeda is on a collision trajectory with the Milky Way. In 2012, data from the NASA Hubble Spatial Telescope became more specific when they confirmed The suspicions that the two galaxies are intended to collide in approximately four or five billion years.

But an analysis of the new data from Hubble and the GAIA space telescope of the European Space Agency led the researchers to question this period. According to Until SawalaAstrophysicist at the University of Helsinki, the probability of this event occurring in the following 10 billion years is around 50/50. Sawala and his colleagues published the results of their analysis in Natural astronomy.

Learn more:: Some stars in our galaxy came from Andromeda

Galactic simulations

The previous simulations had taken into account the gravitational effects of Andromeda and the Milky Way, and some considered the effects of the M33, the third major actor of the local group, explains Cameron HummelsA computer astrophysicist in Caltech.

Sawala and his team, however, carried out around 100,000 simulations using different combinations of possibilities which included the influence of another galaxy in the local group, the large Magellanic cloud (LMC).

“Gaia, the European space telescope that has been working for about 10 years, has really been able to go very well on the movement of Andromeda and the Grand Cloud Magellanic, and M33, in the sky in a much more precise and much more precise way than what we had when these previous iterations of simulations were in progress”.

“It may be somewhat ironic that, despite access to more precise measures, we now find less certainty on the result,” explains Sawala.

And if they Do Collide?

What happens when the galaxies collide? Not much and a lot. The thing to keep in mind is that there is a lot of empty space between the stars. If the two galaxies collide, the chances of individual stars crash into each other are extremely weak, less than one percent, explains Hummels.

“Most of the volume in these galaxies is only an empty space, and the individual stars themselves are tiny compared to the overall volume in which they are seated,” he said.

But that does not mean that there will be no fireworks. Galaxies contain not only stars, but also a significant amount of gas, which feeds the creation of new stars. And these gases will Crush each other and, when they do, these collisions will probably produce new generations of stars.

Some of them will be very massive and will turn into a supernovae very quickly, explains Hummels. So, even if the stars do not collide, the fusion of the two galaxies will not be completely passive.

“He will always have the display of fireworks, even if it is not for the reasons that people might think,” he said.

More data to come

Humans will have left a long time before it happens, even if this happens on the original calendar of four to five billion years. (On the one hand, our sun will be lack of fuel Until then.) But that does not mean that scientists should not think about it. Research like this help us to better understand our galaxy and our universe.

The next version of data from the Gaia telescope is expected in 2026, which should provide even more precise measures of the movement and mass of galaxies in the local group. But making specific predictions require not only more and better data, explains Sawala, but more realistic models.

“The calculations underlying our work and our similar work in this area are ultimately still quite simplistic,” he says. “In my opinion, taking advantage of new and coming measures and understanding both the past and the future development of the local group in its complete cosmological context requires more advanced simulations.”

And that’s exactly what Sawala and his collaborators work on. Stay listening.

Learn more:: Meet the neighbor of the Milky Way: Andromeda Galaxy

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Avery Hurt is an independent scientific journalist. In addition to writing to discover, she writes regularly for a variety of points of sale, both printed and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explore, Medscape and WebMD. She is the author of Bullet with your name: what you will probably die and what you can do on this subject, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery made his debut in journalism while attending the university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the magazine Student non-fiction. Although she writes in all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of conscience and the interests of AI that it has developed while obtaining a diploma in philosophy.