4 Galaxy Pileup

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Orleander, Aug 8, 2007.

  1. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    25,817
    OK, I was wondering. Does this mean God is still creating the heavens and the earth?
    If we can see the merger, if there was life there, could they have seen us? Are there life forms dying or is this survivable?

    Colossal Four-Galaxy Collision Discovered

    Four galaxies are crashing into each other in one of the largest collisions ever seen, scientists say.

    The galactic crash was spotted by astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected a fan-shaped plume coming from a cluster of galaxies nearly five billion light-years away.

    When fully merged, the new galaxy will be up to ten times as large as the Milky Way, astronomers said.

    "Most galaxy mergers are like small pickup trucks filled with sand colliding," explained Kenneth Rines, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

    "This big merger is like two big rigs full of sand colliding and flinging sand everywhere. In this case, the sand represents stars."

    Galactic mergers are fairly common, Rines explained. Most cosmic crashes involve two galaxies of similar size or smaller galaxies coalescing into a larger one.

    What makes this event unique is the sheer size and number of galaxies involved, Rines said.

    "This is a very unusual case," Rines said. "It's a first to have four galaxies merging."

    Three of the star systems are about the size of the Milky Way, and the fourth is about three times as large.

    Another unique aspect of the merger is the apparent lack of new stars being formed, Rines added.

    Typically when galaxies converge, the intervening gas clouds compress and begin to form stars, he explained. But scientists have not detected gas clouds in the four galaxies, which means no new stars will be born from the merger.

    Rines' team will publish the discovery in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Rines said the megacollision will help scientists learn more about how large galaxies are formed.

    "This merger tells us that you can make a clear distinction between when a star in a galaxy forms and when the galaxy itself assembles," he said.

    In this case, all of the stars had formed before the merger.

    "But if you had just looked at the star age [once the new galaxy is fully formed], you would have assumed the galaxy is much older than it really is," he noted.

    Rines hopes to see more of these megamergers, but he admits it was happenstance that his team spotted the new one during a survey of distant galaxy clusters.

    He's also not holding out hope that he'll see the monster galaxy fully formed in his lifetime—it will take about a hundred million years for these four galaxies to finally become one.
     
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  3. 2inquisitive The Devil is in the details Registered Senior Member

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    orleander,
    Change in the universe is a continuing process. When you say 'still' referring to this merger, it is a little inaccurate. What we are just now seeing happened nearly five billion years ago. It took light carring the information five billion years to reach us.
    Any life there could have seen the Milky Way galaxy, but not 'us' or our solar system. Our solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. Any life there at the time of the merger would be looking at our galaxy as it was 10 billion years ago, before our solar system, or humans, existed. Can you figure out why I said 10 billion years and not 5 billion years?

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    Assuming there was life there at the time, some of it may have died in specific solar systems, but possibly some could have survived. Very few stars, or solar systems, normally collide in a merger, but some planetary orbits could have been disturbed and radiation from this particular merger seems intense. In other words, I really don't know regarding this particular merger. The Milky Way is merging with the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy at the present time, but we don't seem to feel any ill effects so far and probably never will.
     
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  5. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    So its possible for life to survive 4 galaxies colliding? Is it that slow?
     
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  7. orcot Valued Senior Member

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    altough the galaxies collide verry little individual stars would actually hit each other and some stars would only be pertubed a little bid... wich all considering is good for life because the inner warmer planets are stronly bonded to their star and thereby little affected of whatever is passing by while large gas clouds can condense creating new stars with their own planets and like 2inquisitive said this happend 5 billion years ago so...
     

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