SoylentNews

RandomFactor writes:

The ESA (European Space Agency) which operates the Hubble Space Telescope together with NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced this month that the distant galaxy Messier 90 is on a collision course with our own Milky Way, and it is speeding up.

As the universe infinitely expands into the void of space from the moment of the Big Bang, light shifts towards the red end of the visible spectrum. But NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a nearby galaxy, Messier 90, shifting to the blue end of the spectrum – a sign it is accelerating towards us.

The vast majority of galaxies are heading away from us, making Messier 90, which is breaking away from the other 1,200 galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, "an incredible rarity."

This puts Messier 90 (60 million light years away) in the company of Andromeda (2.5 million light years) and the Large Magellanic cloud (200,000 light years), both of which which will be colliding with the Milky Way in the next few billion years.

Fortunately galaxy collisions are unlikely to result in any actual stars colliding. According to astronomer Dr Amelie Saintonge of University College London "the probability of two stars colliding is almost zero", so we should be relatively safe from being affected by these collisions billions of years in the future.

This doesn't mean we should sit back however. The sun is likely to make Earth uninhabitable by then through routine heating (the sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years) evaporating our oceans and shifting us into a runaway greenhouse effect similar to what Venus underwent.

Related Coverage
Andromeda may be Closer than Previously Thought
Milky Way to Face a One-two Punch of Galaxy Collisions

Original Submission