Hmm, I haven’t done a “we’re all going to die” post in a while. How about this? Astronomers are now certain that our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbor, M31, more widely know as Andromeda. And we only have 4 billion years to prepare. Guess I need to spend less time on social media.
3 thoughts on “When Stars Collide”
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Gliese 710 will cross paths with the solar system first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710
You know this brings me out. Hmm, let’s see: “Earth and the solar system will probably just go along for the ride and are in no danger of being destroyed.” Then: “M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits.” Also: “it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.” Wow. I love how they write “in the local universe,” like it’s a neighborhood and we’re talking about two grocers merging into one store. . . .
The universe is incredible. I saw a picture of one of those donut galaxies with young stars around an empty-ish region and older stars in the center. WILD!
Time to lie down. 😉
Glad to see you found it. 🙂