(ORDO NEWS) — In a few billion years, the Milky Way and its nearest Andromeda galaxy will collide and merge into a single elliptical galaxy.
She is not there yet, but astronomers have given her a name – Milkomeda. Humanity will probably not survive until that time. But under a new starry sky, maybe a new life will be born.
When the Milky Way merges with the Andromeda Nebula, a single Myklomeda galaxy is formed. And new constellations will light up in the sky
If you look at the constellation Andromeda on a clear night away from city lights, you can barely make out the long blurry blob.
This is the Andromeda Nebula or the Andromeda Galaxy or M31. It is the nearest major neighbor of our Milky Way and lies about 2.5 million light-years away.
There are approximately one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy. It is over 200,000 light years in diameter.
This is significantly larger than the Milky Way, which is approximately 150,000 light-years across. There are about 2-4 times fewer stars in our galaxy than in the Andromeda galaxy.
Discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy
Ancient observers have probably pondered the nature of this “blurred drop” for many thousands of years.
However, the very first report of the Andromeda galaxy dates back to 964 AD, when the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi published a book on the Fixed Stars.
In it, he named Andromeda, and also noted the position of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a much smaller satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.
The Andromeda Galaxy has long been referred to as the “little cloud” in the sky. It wasn’t until the 1800s that astronomers began to realize just how unique Andromeda was.
It is already difficult for us to imagine this, but after all, about a century ago, scientists thought that our Milky Way is the whole Universe.
For some time now, observers using their telescopes to search for comets have been detecting “nebulae,” a term for almost any fuzzy object in the night sky that isn’t a comet.
Spiral shaped nebulae such as Andromeda were called spiral nebulae.
But in 1864, the English astronomer Sir William Huggins used a prism to separate and analyze the different colors of radiation from many nebulae. He noticed that the light spectra of M31 are very different from some of the other nebulae.
In the decades that followed, other astronomers began to notice supernova explosions in Andromeda. In particular, Heber Curtis used the known brightness of these explosions to calculate the distance to Andromeda.
He calculated that this “spiral nebula” is at an unprecedented distance of 500,000 light-years, far beyond our own Milky Way.
And Vesto Slifer, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, turned his 24-inch Clark Telescope on M31 and saw that it was approaching us at an astonishing rate, and almost all other galaxies were moving away from Earth.
His testimony supported the idea that Andromeda was outside the Milky Way and provided the first hard evidence for the expansion of the universe.
Milkomed
As Slifer’s observations first showed, over the next five billion years or so, the Milky Way and Andromeda will gradually converge. When they begin to interact, they will tear off the stars from each other and stretch them into long tails.
As seen from Earth, the Andromeda Galaxy will gradually emerge in our night sky during this collision. But when these galaxies eventually become completely intertwined, they will merge into one huge group of stars.
Then, instead of a spiral galaxy, an elliptical one is formed. Astronomers call this future Milkomed galaxy. In the universe, such mergers occur all the time.
It is likely that extreme bursts of star formation will also occur during the collision of galaxies. This, too, will be visible from our solar system, although humans probably won’t live long enough to see it.
Nevertheless, the aftermath of the collision with Milkomeda will brighten our night sky with bright new stars. And a galactic collision, instead of destroying one of the galaxies, may be the beginning of a new life.
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