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Five billion years from now our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, triggering the birth of stars from smashed together clouds of cosmic gas and dust. This is old news, but exactly what the galactic wreckage will look like is unknown.
Part of the problem is that these mergers take place over millions to billions of years, which is much too long for anyone to witness the whole process. As a work around, astronomers study a variety colliding galaxies at various stages of merging to piece together the picture of what will happen to us.
They've now gotten enough data to assemble an atlas of the galactic train wrecks from start to finish.
"This atlas is the first step in reading the story of how galaxies form, grow, and evolve," Lauranne Lanz of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a news release announcing the accomplishment.
She and colleagues combined recent data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft and Spitzer Space Telescope and presented the images Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston.
GALEX observes in ultraviolet light, which captures emission from hot young stars. Spitzer sees the infrared emission from warm dust heated by those stars, as well as from stellar surfaces. The combined data highlight areas where stars are forming most rapidly, and together permit a more complete census of the new stars.
In general, galaxy collisions trigger star formation, though some mergers trigger few stars than others. Lanz and her colleagues want to figure out what differences in physical processes cause these varying outcomes, which will help guide computer simulations of these smashups.
"We're working with the theorists to give our understanding a reality check," she said in the news release. "Our understanding will really be tested in five billion years when the Milky Way experiences its own collision."
More stories on galactic collisions:
- Head-on galactic collision is an impressive sight
- Black hole knocked off axis by galaxy collision
- Andromeda involved in galactic collision
- Galacitc merger could boot our solar system
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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This is why I don't ride the train!
Our future? Do they really think a species as bent on self destruction as this one is going to be around even a fraction of the time before the 'train wreck'?
I'd like to think humans can stop being so self absorbed and be survival oriented and work for a future but the daily news makes that a fantasy. Too much tribalism and greed.
The irony of this story is that we'll never be able to definitively predict exactly what happens to our Solar System as the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide and merge.
There are three basic possibilities, but none of them can be confirmed as our destiny. As the merger happens our star system's orbit around the Sagittarius A black hole and inner halo of stars at the center of the Milky Way is drastically altered. As the merger happens our star system is ejected clean out of the galaxy. As the merger happens, almost nothing happens to our star system, and it continues orbiting in much the same way as it already does.
There may be a fourth scenario, but it's extremely unlikely. Our star system's orbit is altered in a way where it eventually falls into the Sagittarius A black hole.
There are a plethora of variables that will never be accurately accounted for in order to make an accurate prediction.
Long before this galactic merger even begins to happen, humanity will have far more to worry about with things like asteroid impacts, and nearby stars going supernova/hypernova which will flood the Earth with a lethal dose of high energy radiation.
Not to mention, this merger will begin right around the time the Sun has turned into an orange giant that has inflated to a diameter which will have consumed the Earth.
Hopefully, some of our descendants, probably not biological but based on our personalities and memories, will be roaming the galaxy and avoiding the dangers on the ancestral home planet.
I do think the article was using the term "our future" as a reference to the Milky Way and its inhabitants, not necessarily us.
So, assuming we haven't managed to kill ourselves, our super-great grandchildren will have a cosmos with at least twice as many stars- great opportunity to go star-hopping! Maybe by that time, the US will have paid off its debt and be able to fund a space program again.....
I just cannot understand several things about the types of concern described in this article. First of all, just how accurate are these predictions concerning events that will supposedly happen BILLIONS of years from now? For the sake of supposition, even if these events ARE going to happen, why not let the lifeforms (whatever they may be) who are around in that approximation of time deal with it? Besides, wouldn't they have the technology developed to better handle it? Is it so wrong to just say," the hell with what's going to happen BILLIONS of years from now, let's work on the problems we're dealing with RIGHT NOW. I mean, they supposedly can't even cure the common cold or hayfever (which I dispute on the grounds that it's far more profitable to let these conditions exist, and just sell the same old "temporary" relief, OTC year after year) We can't even seem to get along with each other ON THIS PLANET; why are we so concerned with what some egghead scientist who's more than likely using up millions of dollars in research grants, while at the same time offering up these ridiculous theories and predictions that nobody will even be around to confirm or deny? What a racket. It's all about money; getting it, wasting it, spending it on such ludicrous things like outer space. What a crock!
BOYCOTT OUTER SPACE RESEARCH!
Make those egghead scientists get real jobs, where their performance will be evaluated NOW instead of BILLIONS of years from now, when it will probably be too late to worry about it anyway. Stop pouring all the crazy amounts of money into programs that are doing NOTHING to help the inhabitants of this very sick planet, and use that money to research ways to stop killing ourselves and the environment. Who cares what's going to happen in FIVE BILLION YEARS? Do you? Right, I didn't think so. Neither do I. We need to take a good, honest look at what we're doing now, in regards to wasting resources, throwing the entire eco-system out of balance, and a majorly important topic; one that will help determine whether or not our concerns will even matter, and that is "learning to get along with each other, accepting our cultural differences, and treating each other with respect." Doesn't anybody else see just how important this is? Unless we can accomplish even that, what will be the use of worrying about things billions of years down the road? We'll be lucky to survive to the next millenium, at the rate things are going right now. Priorities, people! Priorities....
What about wasting millions of dollars on movies, cd's, players salaries, war, the amount of the budget the US spends on science outside of military research is miniscule. We more on Social Security, Wellfare, Medicare in one week than on non-military science does in one year.
Five billion years before our galaxy collides with Andromeda? That should give me just enough time to prepare.
keven edwad kelly............STFU !
thats all i have to say about that
Science and the exploration of space and time is a great human pass time.I do love the effort, pictures, stories and fantasy but in reality humans will not exist long enough to witness a miniscule amount of the events predicted. It is depressing for sure to even think as I now do that chances are that there will not even be a reminant of us remaining 100,000 thousand years from now much less a billion.
Our ability to establish a base on the moon is quckly being diminished by the fact that the great amount of resources needed to do so is quickly being depleted by the pressures of human population. Humans on Mars is I believe a pipe dream but dream we must and to try is in our nature.
Another great canidate for 3d mega hologram projection!!....some how the number theory is being undersold here. I would like to see these images in terms of gravitational vectors, at least what we would suppose those vectors to be. As for andromeda, knowing that all the perdictions relate to where we SEE it NOW, which is where it was THEN, Not where IT IS NOW, watch in all the irony, the damn thing ends up with a glancing blow and zings on off into lala land...and the great historians laugh at all the ancient internet postings about the gloom and doom, and even get grants to due para-eclectic studies on patterns and misunderstandings of the ignorant 21st century scientiquacks with multiple letters before and after their names like the titles even meant something....oh well, who are we too question the great white lab coated lords of the silicone. I hope they find more of these mergers and create a hugh catalog that the webb telescope can really zoom in on.......then we finally get our moon base up, we can use moon based telescopes to study them even more.
I played with model trains when I was a kid.............................when I grow up 5 billion years from now, I'll play with the big stuff...............................
Five billion years? Whew...I thought we were done for! At first glance, it looked like five million years.