Our galaxy is set to collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

Published:

Our galaxy is set to collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

 

planets in space in the future

Our galactic home, the Milky Way, is on an inevitable collision course with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy.

Stars, including our Sun, will smash into one another and orbits will fly out of whack. The chaos will go on for some time, but eventually, everything will settle down and the two galaxies will merge into one huge elliptical galaxy.

Don't lose any sleep over this eventuality, though—it won't happen for another 3.75 billion years. 

Entry #1,768

Comments

Avatar eddessaknight -
#1
Not to worry: Not before the Holiday Season :-)
Avatar Stack47 -
#2
"PUBLISHED MARCH 24, 2014"

FYI, Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is now the closest known galaxy to ours. But anyways, thanks for all your useless information.
Avatar jarasan -
#3
@Stack you are the useless information king. You  are rude, classless, and petty.

@SirKnight Thank You!
Avatar Stack47 -
#4
Is it really that difficult for the MAGA Kool-Aid drinkers to admit when they are wrong?

Wow, the village idiot wants to bromance local spammer. Speaking of bromances, what ever happened to the childish name caller, old what's his name?
Avatar noise-gate -
#5
* These so called collisions have been going on for billions of years with all the expansions we told that are happening out there. The James Webb telescope is sending us amazing shots.
Avatar Pick3master3838 -
#6
It's already happening. This came out a couple of months ago that it was already taking place. But what is not correct is that the suns will collide. There is so much space in between everything nothing will collide except for a couple of suns or planets, but very rare.
Avatar Stack47 -
#7
I believe it's all being Trump disciples where the things like the fact Andromeda is not even the closest galaxy to ours is irrelevant. Or pretending like the distance of 25,000 light years is similar to the distance between their favorite fast-food drive thru.

The nearest star is 4.24 light years away and light travels at 186,000 miles per second. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year and doing the math would be a very difficult task using their fingers.

Yep, whatever it takes to spread false and misleading information and downright lies. I was being polite calling galaxies colliding useless information when in fact it's nothing more than preaching to the very gullible MAGA choir.
Avatar grwurston -
#8
Science changes. What was accurate yesterday, is not tomorrow.
If you find information is wrong and you want to correct it, that's fine. Correct it and leave it at that.
If it's useless to you, then read it and move on.
But are the added insults and condescension really necessary?  Especially when the OP doesn't do that to you.
Avatar eddessaknight -
#9
(CNN) -- The James Webb Space Telescope has spied one of the earliest galaxies formed after the big bang, about 350 million years after the universe began.

The galaxy, called GLASS-z12, and another galaxy formed about 450 million years after the big bang, were found over the summer, shortly after the powerful space observatory began its infrared observations of the cosmos.

Webb's capability to look deeper into the universe than other telescopes is revealing previously hidden aspects of the universe, including astonishingly distant galaxies such as these two finds.

hypatia-h-4ef577739571cbdae1746662b5f0d5c0-h-98a379ddb9226d6a4176ced6881dadd4.jpg
The operations center for the telescope is in Baltimore City, at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus. 

The discovery could change the way astronomers understand galaxy and star formation in the early days of the universe.

"With Webb, we were amazed to find the most distant starlight that anyone had ever seen, just days after Webb released its first data," said astronomer Rohan Naidu, research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a statement. Naidu was the lead author of a November study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Previously, the earliest galaxy observed was GN-z11, which existed 400 million years after the big bang and was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016.

"As soon as we started taking data, we discovered that there are many more distant galaxies than we were expecting," said Tommaso Treu, principal investigator for the GLASS-JWST Early Release Science Program and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"Somehow, the universe managed to form galaxies faster and earlier than we thought. Just a few hundred million years after the big bang, there were already lots of galaxies. JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began. And we've just started to explore it," said Treu, who was a coauthor of an October study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The two journal studies have highlighted these discoveries made during the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, also known as GLASS, and the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CEERS.

Timeline shift for early galaxy formation
The early galaxies discovered in this new cosmic frontier are surprising and unusual to astronomers in many ways, Treu said.

Both galaxies have sphere or disklike shapes, and they're just a tiny percentage of the size of the Milky Way galaxy. The two galaxies are incredibly distant, but they're also extremely bright and formed stars very rapidly.

The research findings have suggested that galaxies may have began appearing in the universe just 100 million years after the big bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. This timeline challenges theories astronomers have held about how and when the first galaxies formed.

The early universe was chaotic and crowded, but the structure of the two galaxies appear calm and orderly, said Erica Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was a coauthor of the November study.

The amount of brightness in the two galaxies has puzzled scientists. One possibility is that the galaxies were massive and contained a lot of low-mass stars, which is similar to the types of galaxies that formed later on in the universe.

Or it could suggest the opposite: smaller galaxies with fewer but extremely bright stars. These luminous objects, called Population III stars, have long been theorized as the first stars ever born in the cosmos.

The first stars in the universe would have been blazing with heat and only made of hydrogen and helium. Later stars contain heavier elements that were created when the first stars exploded. So far, no Population III stars have ever been seen within our local universe.

But telescopes that can peer back into the distant universe, effectively looking back in time, may be able to see the first Population III stars one day. The older of the two galaxies, GLASS-z12, might even contain Population III stars, said Adriano Fontana, a member of the GLASS-JWST team and a coauthor of the October study.

Detection of light invisible to the human eye
The new findings about the two galaxies might mean there are other bright galaxies waiting to be found in the distant universe.

The distance estimates of the galaxies are based on Webb's infrared detection. Follow-up spectroscopic observations can confirm how long their light has been stretched across the universe, as well as the rate of star formation in each galaxy and the elements these stars contained.

Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph will capture the data that could lead to these insights.

"These observations just make your head explode. This is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It's like an archaeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn't know about. It's just staggering," said Paola Santini, researcher at the National Institute for Astrophysics' Astronomical Observatory of Rome, who was a coauthor of the October study.

The Webb telescope has entered its fifth month of science operations and has proven to be more powerful and capturing sharper images than prelaunch expectations, said Dr. Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"These galaxies we're talking about are bright," Rigby said. "They were hiding just under the limits of what Hubble could do. They were right there waiting for us. We just had to go a little redder and go deeper than what Hubble could do."

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

First published on November 18, 2022 / 2:56 PM
Avatar grwurston -
#10
Good Info EK!!!
Avatar Stack47 -
#11
"If you find information is wrong and you want to correct it, that's fine."

Says the guy blocking people from commenting so they can't comment on his false and misleading statements. Only the Trump disciples believe making false and misleading statements useful and actually call their lies "information".

"when the OP doesn't do that to you."

Leave it to a pitifully stupid MAGA Kool-Aid drinker to see nothing wrong when their crony copies my post word for word and then gives the quote to someone else. https://www.lotterypost.com/thread/339836
Avatar grwurston -
#12
So you never blocked ridge?
Avatar Stack47 -
#13
Are you talking about the parole violator that is no longer posting, grwurston?
Avatar Stack47 -
#14
Did anyone else notice that grwurston is now saying "Good Info" about a CNN article?

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