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I think the Andromeda collision is likely to not even disturb our solar system. Just like asteroid fields in movies are way too dense, it's easy to overestimat
by kzrdude 6y ago
I think the Andromeda collision is likely to not even disturb our solar system.
Just like asteroid fields in movies are way too dense, it's easy to overestimate what the collision means. It's two _galaxies_ that collide, but their parts don't. Their individual star systems may all pass around each other quite well, for the most part.
- edgyquant 6y agoThat's a couple billion years from now, no? By that time human will either be a kingdom of species or extinct. Kind of weird to talk about it effecting mankind in anyway.
- keithwhor 6y agoI'd consider all future progeny, "humankind." It matters not what my grandchildren look like; only that they have the opportunity to partake in the beauty that is the conscious experience of this Universe.
- oh_sigh 6y agoIt's not collisions that would be the problem, but the interacting gravity throwing previously stable orbits out of whack.
- hinkley 6y agoOn the other hand, the Oort Cloud is likely to experience a shift in elliptical orbits, eventually causing a lot of damage in-system.
- antman 6y agoIf I recall it is not a matter of physical collision but disruption due to the gravitational fields.
- nojokes 6y agoMaybe, but there is also this: As of 2006, simulations indicated that the Sun might be brought near the centre of the combined galaxy, potentially coming near one of the black holes before being ejected entirely out of the galaxy.[11] Alternatively, the Sun might approach one of the black holes a bit closer and be torn apart by its gravity. Parts of the former Sun would be pulled into the black hole. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
- kiba 6y agoThere's nothing preventing our descendent from steering the sun by the time our galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoFor fun, how could we do that?
- svachalek 6y agoKurzgesagt video on this: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoThanks for sharing. Reminds me of the Wet Hot American Summer line about how we are all passengers on starship earth!
- perl4ever 6y agoThere are ~1.5 trillion stars in Andromeda + the Milky Way combined, so I read. Saying that they are mostly empty space seems like a way of rhetorically obscuring the common sense idea that close encounters and collisions would become more likely. Also the statistical distribution of velocities would be more heterogenous, wouldn't it? Bimodal? That ought to have some noticeable effect on dynamics. You also have, I assume, a second central black hole doing something, maybe disrupting an otherwise stable system. It's just weird to say, although it seems to be somewhat popular, that objects in space don't collide, when on the one hand, anyone can look at something like the Moon, and asteroids that look like rubble piles, and we also "listen" to much larger things colliding via LIGO, and I assume people in astronomy related threads know about the central black holes in galaxies that grew to millions of suns.
- perl4ever 6y agoAn analogy that comes to mind is that at an atomic scale, solid objects are mostly empty. However, bombard them with a lot of neutrons and it can have noticeable effects.
- dmd 6y agoMy hand and the wall are both made of matter that consists almost entirely of empty space, and yet when I punch the wall, it hurts, because of the electric fields involved.
- JoeOfTexas 6y agoAcceleration changes are a bi....g problem tho. If we consider ourselves stationary in our milky way orbit, then an external force (incoming galaxy), would sway us quite a bit by altering orbits slightly and with lasting effect.