The possibility that Milky Way shock within billions of years with the Gigantic Galaxy of Andromeda It has been reduced to approximately half, according to new computer calculations announced on Monday.
And in any case, this intergalactic phenomenon will occur long after the expansion of the sun has extinguished a lifetime in the Land.
The Milky Way and the even largest Galaxy of Andromeda approach each other at 100 kilometers per second, and scientists have predicted for a long time that they will collide at about 4.5 billion years.
The previous investigations had suggested that many star systems could end up in the center of this new “Milkomeda” fused galaxy and be absorbed by its supermassive black hole. Alternatively others could be expelled in intergalactic vacuum.
However, “Proclamations on the imminent disappearance of our galaxy seem to be very exaggerated”according to a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
There are only approximately 50% percent probability that the Milky Way and Andromeda shock each other in the next 10,000 million years, the international astrophysic team determined.
“Basically it is like launching a currency in the air,” the main author of the study, Till Sawala, from Helsinki University, told AFP.
The researchers executed more than 100,000 computer simulations using new observations of space telescopes.
A merger of galaxies in the next 5,000 million years is “extremely unlikely,” said Sawala.
It is much more likely that galaxies will pass relatively close to each other-let’s say, a little less than 500,000 light years away.
Only in half of the simulations the dark matter ended up finally dragging the two galaxies towards a cataclysmic hug.
But this would probably only happen in about 8,000 million years-very much after the sun has become a dying white dwarf.
“So it could happen that our galaxy ends destroyed”Sawala said.
“But it is also possible that our galaxy and Andromeda orbitate mutually for tens of billions of years, we simply don’t know.”
The fate of the galaxy is “open”
The fate of the Milky Way “remains completely open,” summarized the study. The researchers emphasized that their findings do not mean that the previous calculations were incorrect, only that they used newer observations and took into account the effect of more satellite galaxies.
A new series of data arising from the Gaia Space Telescope, recently removed, as well as the Hubble, could provide a definitive answer to this question in the next decade, predicted Sawala.