On top of everything else, been sick for the last week. Starting to feel human again, so here's some catch-up:
All good things must come to an end. Or, if you subscribe to the majority world-view, the wheel of time is bigger than we thought. Which is by way of saying that the days of the Milky Way galaxy are numbered. Granted, the number's quite large -- 4 billion years -- but still.
Can't embed the video from NYT, but it's here. It's kind of a gloss, but you'll get the general idea.
All good things must come to an end. Or, if you subscribe to the majority world-view, the wheel of time is bigger than we thought. Which is by way of saying that the days of the Milky Way galaxy are numbered. Granted, the number's quite large -- 4 billion years -- but still.
The Milky Way is one of the dominant galaxies of a cluster known as the Local Group. The other major player in the group is the Andromeda nebula (M31). And according to recent measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, the two galaxies are traveling through space and dark matter headed directly toward each other.
“After nearly a century of speculation about the future destiny of Andromeda and our Milky Way, we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold over the coming billions of years,” says Sangmo Tony Sohn of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. His colleague Roeland van der Marel confirms the research: “Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy.”
Can't embed the video from NYT, but it's here. It's kind of a gloss, but you'll get the general idea.
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