This article shows that the future merging of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies may be sooner than previously thought:
Recent analysis of past observations made by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have found a massive halo of hot, heavy gas surrounding our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. This expansive mass of material around Andromeda could mean that it will begin merging with the Milky Way ahead of schedule.
In fact, the articles goes on to say the merge may have already begun if the Milky Way contains a similarly sized halo.
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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
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2015, @11:50AM
What's it like in Andromeda? Is their version of SoylentNews ruined with terribly abusive moderation like the way Milky Way's SoylentNews is?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Monday May 11 2015, @12:24PM
What's it like in Andromeda?
Not too bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_%28TV_series%29 [wikipedia.org]
I don't think "andromeda ascendant" is a very creative ship name. Then again it wasn't a very creative show, and my local navy thinks city and state names are wildly creative, so I suppose a "space battleship" named after a galaxy is not too unreasonable of an extrapolation. Then again Culture ships have vastly more creative, more memorable, names.
I'm pretty sure the ship AI is the girl from hak5 or a look alike clone. No surprise at all, she's hot so the andromeda actress is Canadian. Its the side issues that make the show interesting. So you've got a ship full of "seamen" (ha ha) and on one hand making the ship AI look like that probably gets a lot of attention from the crew, yet, is also likely to be incredibly distracting.
In the push for AI phone/watch/Siri type stuff I'd consider using Siri if she looked like the andromeda ship AI, but as a disembodied voice I donno. Speaking of Siri the shittyness of modern UI design is on display where on ST:TOS you'd push a freaking button to launch torpedos or WTF but on the Andromeda you need to chat up the ship's AI, convince her to go home with you, and then after 5 minutes of that BS you can talk her into launching her torpedos. Modern UI design is difficult hard work and an amazing technological achievement, and its also hideously anti-productive and slow and useless, just drill "her" console and install a "fire torpedos" pushbutton and skip all that shitty modern UI design work.
Its definitely a "guilty pleasure" class of TV show. Its really, really dumb, yet somewhat entertaining. I'm not sure if the writers were aiming for lowest common denominator intentionally, or were just dumb and uncreative. If you ignore that, maybe put it on "mute" and watch anyway, the special effects are pretty good and its moderately entertaining. Its one of those things where investing the cost of one martial arts / dancing fight scene or one special effects scene into the writing would have dramatically improved the show. Then again (spoiler alert) didn't the high rave chick crewwoman become the soul of a star (insert eye rolls here) ?
Its fun to watch the show and tick of the parodies of other shows. Oh she's their Deanna Troi. Once again James Kirk bangs the chick with green skin. Come on Scotty stop BSing the captain about it taking 3 days and just do it in 10 seconds. Thank god someone finally shot jar jar binks. Help me obi one you're my only hope. I suppose there's a drinking game buried in there. Hey I lost my crew, but luckily the Village People were playing a set in the local star system so we gots us a new crew of crazy country bumpkins. Y M C A let me tell you bout the Y M C A...
Or in summary, its cool inside the Andromeda, at least cool enough to visit. Not sure if I'd want to join the crew, at least not permanently.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday May 11 2015, @04:08PM
Have you ever considered that maybe you're just wrong about everything?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2015, @11:27PM
The abusive moderation is what's wrong.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Covalent on Monday May 11 2015, @12:09PM
Does this discovery have any bearing on the calculations regarding dark matter? If this halo surrounds Andromeda, then perhaps such a halo also surrounds all galaxies. Would such a halo make a dent into the "missing matter"?
I can't wait until the Dark Matter / Dark Energy mystery is solved. "We can see it, detect it, or know what it's made of, but we know it's there..." situation is awful.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Monday May 11 2015, @12:18PM
I'm by no means a specialist, but in a documentary I saw they mentioned that some information on the distribution of the dark matter is available. [space.com] I guess if dark matter could be explained by halos around galaxies, we would have estimated the galaxies that much heavier in the first place.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by inertnet on Monday May 11 2015, @12:28PM
Wouldn't this contact region already have to be slightly warmer and thus detectable?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 11 2015, @04:35PM
Monday morning, an I'm already calling Rule 34...
Gonna be a long week.
(Score: 1) by utoddl on Monday May 11 2015, @07:16PM
I think we heard about the barrier surrounding the galaxy somewhere [wikipedia.org] before.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 12 2015, @12:03AM
Collision Alert! Collision Alert!! All hands brace for impact!!!
merging with the Milky Way ahead of schedule.
Is that "Milky Way ahead", or "Milky Way way ahead of schedule"?
(Score: 2) by jbWolf on Tuesday May 12 2015, @03:31AM
[Drumming fingers.]
Good grief, man. How long am I going to have to brace? I have binge watching I need to go do.
www.jb-wolf.com [jb-wolf.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 12 2015, @05:43AM
Turns out, galactic impacts are a little deficient on the "impact" side of things. Mostly galaxies go right through each other, like ships passing in the night, and nothing actually runs into anything. But there can be some interesting gravitational interactions! I mean, it is Andromeda, so at least we can say, "We are the Krakon!" or something like that.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:09AM
I just wanted to say that it's exciting to live during a period of time when folks are making these kinds of observations.
It's truly fascinating.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 12 2015, @07:35AM
Not just the observations, but it was not until the 1920's, with Hubble, that the idea that we were looking at another galaxy when we viewed the "Andromeda Nebula" came into existence. Rather recent, in the scope of human existence and thinking that I am familiar with. An equally radical shift as Galileo observing moons around Jupiter, and realizing, "hey, it's a planet, has moons, we have a moon, we are a planet!" Now, thanks to Hubble, we know we are a galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and not the Mounds galaxy or the Snickers Galaxy. Start with the sublime, end up with candy bars. My apologies.