We know that the gaseous extremes of our galaxy and our neighboring galaxy are being touched, but there is no worry. Although astronomers safely a fusion of the Milky Way with Andromeda, they now question it.
Short. A astropathic team has just published the biggest portrait of Andromeda, our neighboring galaxy, thanks to the Hubble observations. The image covers 600 fields of vision of the space telescope and shows the entire Andromeda album, which now has more than 200 million censored stars (two orders of magnitude more than those known so far).
Although Andromeda’s gas bubbles are already touching the Milky Way, the new data 50% reduce probability that galaxies collide.
Gaseous collision. In 2020, the Amiga program mapped 43 quasars in the background, confirming that Andromeda’s plasma halo, a hot gas bubble that measures two million light years, It flasses with the gas halo of the Milky Way.
In a way, the gaseous bodies of both galaxies are already being touched, although in a faint way that neither the stars nor the planets notice it, so it will not be necessary to fill a friendly part of an accident.
Maybe it never happens. The New 2.5 Gigapixel image of AndromedaResult of the PHAT and PHASET observation campaigns of the Hubble, it is not only another feat of the space telescope. It has served to question the theory that Andromeda and the Milky Way will end up merging.
The classical narrative said that both spiral galaxies They would melt in about 4.5 billion yearsforming a giant elliptical. The new model, published in Nature Astronomyreduce the probability of fusion to 50% after 100,000 simulations.
How they know. Astronomers at the University of Washington integrated the new Hubble data and the Gaia space telescope of the European space agency in their simulations. In addition to Andromeda and the Milky Way, they included the updated mass of the Great Cloud of Magallanes and m33.
The key is in these two satellite galaxies. M33 Andromeda and the probability of shock increases. But the great cloud of Magallanes, with an almost perpendicular orbit, pushes the Milky Way out of the plane and reduces the meeting rate. In the most extreme stage, the front blow is still possible; In the softest, both galaxies will limit themselves to orbly during eons.
What we were. The contact of the Andromeda plasma halos and the Milky Way suggests that the exchange of gas between both galaxies has already begun, but that does not guarantee a galactic fusion: the discs are still 2.5 million light years.
In order for the merger to occur, the friction of the hals would have to stop the galaxies until the separation is 300,000 light years. Half of the trajectories simulated by the new study discard it.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings