Wonders of the Universe

COLLISION COURSE

Of the six thousand or so stars we can see from Earth with the naked eye, only one object lies beyond the gravitational pull of our galaxy. The picture below is of Andromeda, which is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way Galaxy and the most distant object visible to anyone who looks up into the night sky with just the naked eye. It may appear as nothing more than a smudge in the heavens, but recent observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that it is home to a trillion suns.

Andromeda is just one of a hundred billion galaxies in the observable Universe, but there is one thing that singles it out, other than its proximity. While most galaxies are rushing away from each other as the Universe expands, Andromeda is in fact moving directly towards us, getting closer at a rate of around half a million kilometres (310,000 miles) every hour. It seems the two galaxies are destined to meet, guided by the force of gravity.

A galactic collision sounds like a rare and catastrophic event – the meeting of a trillion suns – but in fact such collisions and the resultant mergers of galaxies are not unusual occurrences in the history of the Universe; both the galaxies of Andromeda and the Milky Way have absorbed other galaxies into their structures over the billions of years of their existence.

The sequence of images on the next page has been created as a computer simulation of what would happen during a galactic collision between our neighbour Andromeda and our own Milky Way. The Milky Way Galaxy is shown face-on and you can see it moving from the bottom, up to the left of Andromeda, and then finally to the upper right. From this perspective Andromeda appears tilted.

These images are 1 million light years across, and the timescale between each frame of the sequence is 90 million years. After the initial collision, an open spiral pattern is excited in both the Milky Way and Andromeda, and long tidal tails and the formation of a connecting bridge of stars are apparent. Initially the galaxies move apart one from another, but then they fall back together to meet in a second collision.

As more stars are thrown off in complex ripple patterns, they settle into one huge elliptical galaxy. Spiral galaxies such as Andromeda and the Milky Way are the pinnacle of complexity, order and beauty, but elliptical galaxies are sterile worlds where few stars form. If we humans, and indeed Earth itself, are still here in roughly 3 billion years, this collision will be a spectacular event. Just before we collide, the night sky will be filled by our giant neighbour. When the two galaxies clash there will be so much energy pumped into the system that vast amounts of stars will form, lighting up the whole sky

The Andromeda Galaxy is shown here in its full glory through an infrared composite image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which shows the galaxy’s older stars (left) and dust (right) separately. Spiral galaxies such as this one tend to form new stars in their dusty, clumpy arms.

NASA