Mark Sachs ([info]ksleet) wrote,
@ 2008-05-20 01:26:00
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Current mood:late
Current music:Zuntata - Toxoplasma
Entry tags:science

Deep Time.
Okay, I know I said I was going to bed but I have to drop this on you first.

About three or four billion years from now the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy are going to collide with each other. While a galactic collision isn't a meaningful hazard to the objects within the galaxies, since stars are so far apart from each other that they are very unlikely to collide, both galaxies' structure will be churned into mush. And this is what it will look like from the perspective of our Sun as it is flung into a long, megayear orbit around the wreckage.



A span of time so long that the very framework of the sky melts away. Would it be scarier to think that no human will be alive to see this? Or would it be scarier to think that a human will?

Sleep tight!


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[info]sector_r
2008-05-20 03:36 pm UTC (link)
Well, I can't say that I'm surprised. I used to be but now I honestly expect indifferent government mismanagement like this. The government can't even control the weather to everyone's satisfaction... and keeping galaxies (including the one we happen to live in) from colliding into each other? Hey, that won't happen until after the next election, so who cares?

Feh.

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[info]teflon_tim
2008-05-20 04:00 pm UTC (link)
You'd all better vote for me, or the galaxies will collide. I'll make sure of it.

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[info]ksleet
2008-05-20 07:06 pm UTC (link)
Isn't Prince Zordar from the Andromeda galaxy? That cunning bastard.

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[info]electroweak
2008-05-22 07:17 am UTC (link)
The rotation of Andromeda around the scene is due to the Sun's orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. In the video, each such orbit is taking 40 seconds. Since the length of the Sun's orbit is 250 million years, each second of the video is 6,250,000 years.

To give you an idea of scale, the horse evolved from an animal eight inches tall in just eight such "seconds," and humans evolved four one-hundredths of a "second" ago.

It would be terrifying to imagine that no human (or intelligent species evolved from us) would be there to view this collision, and it would be glorious if our descendants were there.

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