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A pair of space telescopes is giving astronomers an unprecedented view of stellar birth and death in the Andromeda Galaxy, located about 2.5 million light-years away.
The combined image was made using data from the European Space Agency's Herschel and XMM-Newton observatories, which targeted the galaxy during Christmas 2010.
The space telescopes view the universe in wavelengths of light that are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and thus unavailable to ground-based telescopes.
Herschel, which is sensitive to far infrared light, picks up the rings of star formation seen here as reddish circles filled with clouds of cool dust and gas. It is the most detailed image ever acquired of the galaxy in this wavelength, showing five concentric rings of star-forming dust, ESA reports in today's image advisory.
Inside the dusty clouds, stars are pulling themselves together in a gravitational process that can last hundreds of millions of years. Once a star reaches enough density, it will shine in light visible to ordinary telescopes.
Superimposed on the infrared image is an X-ray view made with the XMM-Newton observatory. X-rays show stars in their violent death throes. This image highlights hundreds of X-ray sources clustered around the center of Andromeda. Some of the X-rays are from debris rolling through space from exploded stars; others are pairs of stars locked in a gravitational fight to the death, according to ESA.
In these fights, already-dead stars pull in gas from their still-living companions. As the gas falls through space, it heats up and emits X-rays. The living star will eventually become depleted as the stellar corpse wraps itself in the stolen gas. This corpse could then explode.
The Andromeda Galaxy is similar to our own Milky Way, though about twice as big. Over the years, it has consumed dwarf galaxies that wander too close to it, and astronomers believe it is headed our way for a merger in about 3 billion to 5 billion years.
For more on the Andromeda Galaxy, check out these stories below.
- The galaxy next door
- Andromeda is a cannibal and heading our way
- NASA captures amazing view of Andromeda
- Andromeda involved in galactic collision
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).
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Speachless....
Shoulda sent a poet...
Only 3-5 billion years. What are we going to do??? :)
While no one can say exactly how the milky way will collide with Andromedae or that it will occurr at all, it could just be a simple brushing by. If our galaxies are moving toward each other then Andromedae is most likely locked onto the milky way gravitationally and is exerting its gravitational influence on the milky way, pulling us toward it. Wether its a direct hit core to core or an arcing around the outer edges of Andromedae which would be a miss, our milky way galaxy could be accelerated and thrown well past Andromedae, which might already have been the case and we're closing in again for a second near miss. Our solar system didn't exist then and it won't exist if and when the milky way galaxy collides or has a near miss with Andromedae. Whatever remnants left of our solar system in the outer fringes of the milky way could get stretched apart and merged with Andromedae however as our galaxies pass.
But we have probably been dancing around Andromedae for billions of years already, and we are its prey.
Our Sun will supernovae long before then.
Well, we've probably had plenty of time for our galactic structures to settle any previous brush-by's so there are no telltale distortions, and no we'd dance around the core for millions of years before becoming merged, and direct core hits are possible, but there is elasticity at play also.
But it does appear gravity is in play between our galaxies.
In the absence of another star to feed our Sun it will not go supernova. (supernovae is plural btw). The Sun will never go supernova, it just doesn't have enough mass. It will become a Red Giant and that will eventually lead to it becoming a planetary nebula.
" Star on star" collisions do occurr and most likely much more frequently in active galactic cores with black holes and that space of black holes within the galacticic nucleus is not very immense, stars do rip each other apart within the galactic nucleus, now multiply that with galactic cores that have collided and passed through each other. The gravitational elasticity of dancing cores does play out over several billion years until you wind up with galaxies like our milky way and Andromedae that haven't had any encounters for a very long time. However Andromedae does show all the signs in its spiral arms of recent cannibalism and is still distributing its acquired mass.
I do find it interesting though that the satellite galaxies that were cannibalized and consumed by both of our galaxies, the cores would then appear to have remained intact and those core remnants may still have their galactic black holes. So both Andromedae and the Milky Way have likely "licked the plate clean" with regard to smaller galaxies in our Local Cluster, and their core remnants have not merged with the cores of our galaxies but remain as more of a very large star cluster of very old stars, such as are likely to be found near galactic cores. Seems to me these would be some of the most interesting parts of our galaxy to study, as examples of the aftermath of galactic cannibalism, and how the remnant nucleus of former galaxies and their black holes affect the larger galaxy, or how proccesses differ within those satellite cores with respect to our galactic nuceleus. Do those former core's black holes shut down and collapse over time?
As I recall the Milky Way is currently eating a small galaxy. But Andromeda and the Milky Way have never had a near miss. When the two galaxies eventually do collide they will merge. Andromeda will eat us up.
Yeah, I don't remember them ever having a near miss. Perhaps I missed that article.
I think the term for a Sun our size would be a white dwarf....and it isn't a requirement or limited to binary systems for supernovaes to occurr, so or Sun will disappear when it runs out of fuel, it doesn't need another star to feed or progress to a supernovae, it will die as any other star does, shedding and blowing off it its layers, producing heavier elements in its core, and collapsing upon itself, possibly leaving a white dwarf star, or a nebulae not unlike many other nova-nebulae remnants. And no we don't know wether the milky way and Andromedae have exchanged swipes, or close encounters, but obviously Andromedae has enough gravitational strength to be on a collision course, so it is speculative to say that this may be the early stages of the dance between galaxies, and just as speculative to say that dance may have started long ago, that it doesn't take an immediate merger. That even the milky way is a sufficiently large enough galaxy with enough to mass to escape becoming merged with Andromedae is also a possibility. The milky way will not merge with Andromedae at first and may completely be slingshotted past Andromedae. Its not gonna merge like magnets, it wont occurr that fast. In fact they may even repel each other.
So go ahead and chip away....you want a chisel.....every forum has its trolls.