(ORDO NEWS) — A well-known fact: the neighboring galaxy Andromeda Nebula is approaching ours – the Milky Way. It flies towards at a speed of about 140 kilometers per second.
And the time will come when the galaxies will surely collide. According to various estimates, this universal cataclysm will occur in 3-5 billion years. But scientists have taken care of them now, imagining what the consequences will be.
Canadian astrophysicists from the University of Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario
simulated the approach of the solar system with other stars. Considered almost 3 thousand options. We found out that “strong perturbations” threaten the danger – stars with a mass no less than the sun.
If they fly at a speed of about 20 kilometers per second and no further than at a distance of 250 astronomical units, this is 250 distances from the Earth to the Sun. They will not do harm right away – they will start as they approach.
The stability of the solar system is affected, and seemingly insignificant, perturbations introduced from the outside. When they add up. “Alien” stars destabilize the movement of our planets – drive them out of their orbits, bringing chaos.
As simulations have shown, outside influences sometimes led to the fact that the Earth collided with Mars, Mercury collided with Venus, and Neptune and Uranus generally flew away into space. What the Canadians informed in a scientific article for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It can be found on the preprint site.
The remnants of the solar system, the remaining collisions of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Nebula, will move closer to the center of the newly formed giant galaxy – Milkomeda (Milkomeda), as some astronomers call it.
The public naturally worries about whether stars in merging galaxies will start colliding directly? So, head to head, as they say?
Radio astronomers habitually reassure: our distant descendants, if they remain, are hardly worth fearing that some star will crash directly into the Sun. Because from one star to another is very far away. The average distance across the universe is 160 billion kilometers.
The chance of a collision is minimal. Here and at the University of Toronto, based on the results of simulations, they assure that a direct collision is possible somewhere once every 100 billion years. I mean, it’s practically impossible.
By the way, the invasion of alien stars is threatened not only by the merger of galaxies, but by displacements within our own.
As Spanish and British astronomers once confirmed, and Russian astronomers assured a little earlier, 70 thousand years ago, the so-called Scholz star flew through the solar system at a distance of a light year from the Sun, which was once discovered by amateur astronomer Ralf-Dieter Scholz (Ralf-Dieter Scholz).
Fortunately, the “stray” did not cause any harm due to its smallness. She was a red dwarf with a mass of one tenth of the sun.
The studies also showed that a white dwarf WD 0310–688 (HIP 14754) flew up to the Sun before Scholz’s star. It happened 300 thousand years ago. And over the past 2 million years, 9 stars of small mass approached our world.
Over the next 2 billion years, two stars will be near the solar system – also of small mass – Gliese 710 and Hip 85605. Others – larger ones – have not yet been found in the foreseeable future.
Of the discovered objects, it is seriously worth fearing the third star – the neutron, which was recently pointed out by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Institute (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian – CfA).
Approximately 2000 years ago, it, located approximately 20 thousand light-years from us, was “directed” towards the solar system by a supernova explosion. And now the star is approaching at a speed of 2.62 million kilometers per hour.
The diameter of a neutron star is about 20 kilometers. But it weighs like 500,000 planets like ours.
With its colossal gravity, it can bring confusion into the structure of the universe.
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