Nasa, Esa, J. Depasquale and E. Wheatley (StSCI) and Z. Levay
Andromeda Vista Da Terra
We can be rested: new calculations say that there are only 2% of galaxies to collide over the next 5 billion years.
The Milky Way and its neighboring andromed galaxy are approaching, and for years it was believed that the end result would be a collision, but new calculations reduced this probability to 2% over the next 5 billion years.
A study by Nature Astronomy on Monday analyzed recent data from the NASA space telescope and the Gaia space telescope of the European space agency, performing more than 100,000 simulations, with variables that had not been previously considered.
In this way, they mapped the future over the next 10 billion years of the Milky Way and andromeda, currently approaching a speed of about 100 kilometers per secondand a collision would be devastating to both.
The study, conducted by researchers from the universities of Helsinquia, Durham and Toulouse, indicates that, in any case, it is very difficult to make a precise forecast, the EFE agency reported on Monday.
Among the new data incorporated in the simulations was the effect on the Milky Way of the Great Cloud of Magalhães (a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way).
Although the mass is only about 15% of the Milky Way, its gravitational force, directed perpendicular to its orbit with andromeda, disturbs the movement of our galaxy enough to significantly reduce the possibility of a fusion.
Scientists have found that There are only 2% of the hypotheses that galaxies collide in the next 5 billion yearsobserved the University of Durham, in a statement. This scenario contradicts the previous beliefs, which indicated that a collision was a certainty in that period.
In just over half of the simulated scenarios, the Milky and Andromeda Way undergoes at least a close meeting before losing sufficient orbital energy to eventually collide and merge, but within 8 to 10 billion years, not five. On this time scale, the sun will have already deleted.
In most other simulated cases, the two galaxies are so distant that they continue to evolve virtually without disturbance for a long time.
The new discoveries do not imply an error in previous calculations, but rather that the team has been able to include more variables in their simulations thanks to the modern data of space telescopes, explained Till Sawala, lead author of the University of Helsinchy study.
Till Sawala specified that, when they tried to depart from the same premises as previous investigators, they obtained the same results.
“Now we know that there is a very good hypothesis ”that the fate of a collision of galaxies is avoidedadded Carlos Frenk, from the University of Durham.
The researcher added that, seeing the results of the team’s calculations, he is surprised that they can simulate “so precisely the evolution of gigantic star clusters over millions of millions of years and determine their final destination.”
For Frenk, this is “a proof of the power of physics combined with the power of the great supercomputers.”
