About a hundred years ago, we discovered that The Andromeda Galaxythe largest galaxy near us, not receding, but approaching the Milky Way. Experts gradually came to that conclusion that the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years and the two galaxies will agree. It would be a spectacular sight for Earth-based sky watchers, although such a collision would have little effect on the fate of most stars and planetary systems.
To Sawala from the University of Helsinki and his colleagues are now slightly spoiling the prospects for an amazing celestial display in the future. According to their hitherto unreviewed study, published on the preprint server arXiv, the probability of massive star islands colliding in the next 10 billion years is about fifty percent.
Uncertain accident
Neither the Milky Way nor the Andromeda Galaxy are “hanging” in empty space. Both galaxies belong to the large Local Group of galaxies, which contains about 30 galaxies (including dwarf ones) within about 10 million light years. The galaxies in Andromeda, along with the Milky Way, are the largest and most massive, but this does not mean that they do not affect the gravitational power of other Local Group galaxies.. This creates a galactic variant of the famous “three-body problem”, that is, the problem of calculating the future motion of, in this case, more than three bodies that affect each other. very much.
The three-body problem is known to be computationally demanding. When Sawala and his colleagues added the gravitational pull of the third and fourth largest galaxies of the Local Group to their calculations of the motion of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, Galaxy in the Triangle a The Large Magellanic Cloudthere has been much uncertainty regarding the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. According to scientists, the chances of a “straightforward” accident are about one to one.
2024-08-20 15:57:46
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