• Question: how long will it take for the nearest solar galaxy to collide with our galaxy?

    Asked by 626sptm52 to Ollie, Hermine, Christine, Angus on 8 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I am not an astronomers so I got this answer from the web for you: “Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraled neighbour, Andromeda. The galaxies as we know them will not survive. … Then, the solar system will have a new cosmic address.

    • Photo: Alexander Burke

      Alexander Burke answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Hermine. The Galaxy Andromeda is on course to smash into our solar system in around 4 billion years. The Andromeda galaxy is much larger (I think its twice the size) as our own galaxy so it will “eat” our galaxy with relative ease.

Comments

  • Photo: Guy

    Guy commented on :

    Our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy will merge into one new galaxy. Most of the stars will survive this (it’s hard to break a star!), but some will be flung out of the system (“slingshot” effect) and will drift out into intergalactic space.

    There’s gas (mainly hydrogen) as well as stars in a galaxy. The gas will get really stirred up in the collision. Some will collapse to make lots of new stars: astronomers see this happening in more-distant “starburst” galaxies. Some of the gas might get dumped into the high-mass black holes at the centres of the two galaxies and then they would appear briefly as “active galactic nucleii” (AGN). These AGN can get really bright, even by the standards of exploding stars like supernovae; probably the brightest things in the universe.

    BTW, the sun will be very old by then and will have shrunk to a white dwarf star. Earth and all the other inner planets will be gone, melted when the sun went through its red-giant phase.