science

Milky Way to SLAM into another galaxy WAY sooner than expected


The universe appears impossible to comprehend, both in its unimaginable celestial time scales and its infinite size. Yet mankind’s relentless curiosity about deep space is starting to reap rewards, with breakthroughs about black holes and the big bang. And now newly-released simulations from a Durham University scientific team have revealed apocalyptic implications for mankind and the Milky Way we inhabit.

The Milky Way galaxy is Earth’s home, along with an estimated 250 billion other stars.

However, all this is about to change, because our most massive satellite galaxy – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is on a collision course with the Milky Way.

Dr Cautun, a member of the Durham University scientific team which used supercomputer models to calculate the chance of the collision, exclusively outlined the timeframe and two main effects the cosmological crash.

He said: “The collision will take place in about two billion years – while this is very long compared to a human life, it is very short for cosmic phenomena, which take place on time frames of many billions of years.”

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First of all the collision will wake up the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, which could grow in mass by a factor of ten.

“This will trigger a quasar at the centre of our galaxy and will spew immense amounts of radiation in all wavelengths.

“Thankfully, the Earth is far enough from the centre of our galaxy and life on it is unlikely to be affected.

The secondly, however, will trigger a chain of events that can pose a danger to life.

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Dr Cautun, a member of Durham University’ Institute for Computational Cosmology said: “The collision will dislodge other stars from their neat orbits around our galaxy.

“This, in turn, will increase the chance for a close encounter between our Solar System and another star or gas cloud. Such an encounter can change the orbits of the planets, including that of the Earth.

“Any such change is very dangerous for life, since even small variations in the distance between the Earth and the Sun can move our planet outside the Goldilocks zone and make it either too hot or too cold for life.

And corollary of this could put the Solar System on a trajectory that will take it outside our galaxy.

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Dr Cautun said: “If we are unlucky, after a few hundred million years, our descendants will be outside the galaxy, in an area mostly devoid of other stars.

“This will make it tremendously more difficult for our descendants to travel to other stars – if they haven’t yet done so by that time.

“Currently, the nearest star is 4 light years away, however if our Solar System is outside the Milky Way, the nearest star would be hundreds or even thousands of light years away.”

When pressed as to the the practical purpose of running such simulations, the findings could have profound implications in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.

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He said: One of the very important points for me is that this is yet another example of how dynamic and constantly evolving our Universe is.

“This evolution is often driven by violent events like the LMC collision and this does not seem favourable for phenomena, like the evolution of complex life, that requires billions of years of environmental stability.

“This calls into question the prevalence of complex intelligent life in the Universe. Perhaps we are more alone in the Universe than we thought.”

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