Introduction to translation:
Nothing remains the same, and the universe is constantly changing, and the strangest form of this change is undoubtedly the process of fusion of galaxies, that epic dance between billions of stars, which scientists have been studying thoroughly for decades, only to discover about a decade ago that our galaxy (our home in which we live and is called the "Milky Way") is on its way to a similar merger with its neighbor "Serial Woman", and the question here is: What will happen to us at that moment? An interesting and accessible article by Marina Koren, editor of The Atlantic, sheds light on the matter.
Translation text:
While gravity plays a key role in preventing coffee spilling on your shirt here on Earth, this hidden force is at the same time a bond with cosmic matter in space to crush gas and dust into radiant new stars, smooth rocks clumping into spherical planets, and play a key role in crushing entire galaxies together. This process occurs when gravity continues to push two, three, or perhaps more galaxies toward each other until they all meet, swing their contents, and blend into a slow chaos that reshapes all these galaxies into one large galactic sphere.
Astronomers have observed almost every stage of this process, known as "galactic fusion processes." Galaxies clump together early in the process as if they were attending a very important space conference, and so on until they move on to the next stage, where gravity plays a role in changing the original shapes of these galaxies so that in the end there is only an ocean of chaos left around. By then, the only sign of a merger would be a faint flash of stellar matter orbiting this celestial body (caused by the merger of galaxies).
The Gemini North telescope took the latest image of this type of merger of the galaxies NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 (nicknamed Siamese twins or butterfly galaxies), and the images show the beginning of the merger of the two galaxies in bright and wonderful details, but the merger process is still at a very early stage of interaction, but at some point the two galaxies will oscillate around each other, and the stars crouching inside them will struggle and result in the birth of new stars, and these processes will continue until everything merges within 500 million years. Today, the galaxies look like a tiny paper heart.
The most recent image of this type of fusion of the galaxies NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 (nicknamed Siamese twins or butterfly galaxies). (NOIRLab)
The merger of galaxies is one of the most imaginary events in the universe. While the Supernova scene (a massive explosion in which a star throws its envelope into space at the end of its life) can leave us as dazzled and dazzled as the spectacle of collisions between black holes, intergalactic mergers have more splendor than other cosmic phenomena, as well as wonderful daydream material that can fuel our fantasies of extraterrestrial life.
Stuck in the midst of the merger of two galaxies
The two galaxies we talked about earlier are full of stars, and as we learned from observing our Milky Way galaxy, most stars revolve around planets, and this means that if we leave a little free rein to our imaginations, we may reach the possibility that these galaxies are home to someone else, and if we assume that they were, this may lead us to an important question, which is: What will it be like to be immersed in the midst of a massive event such as the merger of his galaxy with another galaxy?!
To answer such a question, Vicente Rodríguez Gomez, an astronomer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, explains: "The scene will be absolutely stunning as soon as night falls, daylight fades, and you look to the night sky and find it full of newborn stars, and you will witness a torrent of twisted streams of stars, gas and dust all over the sky." If you live along the outer edges of the galaxy, the scene will be very picturesque: the night sky will appear less crowded with stars than the galaxy's busy center, and the place on the edges of the galaxy will allow you to observe the other galaxy merged with your galaxy sparkling in the dark larger and brighter than any other star. The large galaxy suspended in the dark sky will be represented as a fact of your existence in this amazing event, just as the fact that there is a moon full of craters orbiting the Earth.
What's even more interesting is that you can believe it all without doubting this information, explains Moya McTeer, an astrophysicist and author of The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. Despite the merger of the two galaxies, McTeer maintains that the possibility of your sun colliding with another star during this process is highly unlikely: "Have you ever seen an infantry show moving harmoniously through each other? This is the same way stars merge galaxies, crossing through each other seamlessly and uniformed musicians stepping on grass."
The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by astrophysicist Moya Macter. (Social Media)
"There will certainly be more stars around our sun, but luckily the space is still vast, and most of these stars won't be in danger of colliding with something else." But if your planet is too far away and located far away on the galaxy, then you may have a problem: extreme activity can break stars from the edges of the galaxy and eject them into the depths of intergalactic space.
It is true that stars during the merger process skip each other accurately, but the distance between them can be a bit chaotic, and Jehan Kartlepe, an astrophysicist from the Rochester Institute of Technology who studies the formation of galaxies, says: "Galaxies contain huge clouds of gas and dust, and as soon as the galaxies overlap with each other, these huge clouds collide with each other and this process results in foggy pockets of gas and dust in the night sky, which eventually collapse under the influence of their weight, and melt mutant. to brand new stars."
More precisely, astronomers can observe these regions that witnessed the stellar explosion by analyzing the glaxy fusion footage provided by telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope footage of the Antennae Galaxies (two of the closest pairs of colliding galaxies to Earth, 65 million light-years away), where the Hubble telescope showed that the collision between them occurred nearly 600 million years ago, and the spiral structure of both galaxies was destroyed, resulting in this. Clusters of new stars collide that appear twinkling in the form of a flash of light blue.
An image observed by the Hubble Space Telescope of the antennae galaxies resulted in a cluster of new stars that appear twinkling in the form of a flash of light blue.
(Wikipedia)
The fate of the hypothetical population
When galaxies collide, the stellar material of these galaxies migrates to other parts of the galaxy, and the giant black holes — which scientists believe are at the centers of most large galaxies — follow the same path and travel from their places. Meanwhile, black holes, which are invisible, superdense, supermassive objects, are sweeping away other objects such as hidden meteorites and some stars (which may have swallowed part of them along the way).
Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at the University of Connecticut and a researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, USA, who studies the fate of supermassive black holes during the merger of galaxies, explains: "When two galaxies begin to merge, their supermassive black holes sink toward the center of this newly formed galaxy, ending up merged into one large black hole."
But if we think a little, we may wonder what would result from the collision of 3 galaxies, and what the fate of these black holes would be, so Mingarelli goes on to talk about this possibility: "In the case of a collision of 3 galaxies, the most likely scenario is that two of them find each other and form a binary system, and when the third galaxy arrives and begins to interfere with the previous two galaxies, the less massive black hole of the three holes is completely expelled out of the galaxy, which means the possibility of a hole Enormous lions roaming around the universe." But what we don't realize is that it takes millions or perhaps billions of years for these phenomena to witness.
What will happen exactly is that about 5 billion years from now the Andromeda galaxy will intertwine with us, and once that happens the spiral arms of our galaxy will disappear, as will our supermassive black hole. (Event Horizon Telescope)
So the hypothetical inhabitants of the Siamese twin galaxies, for example, won't notice any changes in their bright night skies throughout their lifetime, but at least they may be well aware of their existence in the midst of a massive galactic fusion between their galaxy and another. Imagined astronomers there can examine archival observations from previous generations and collect data to help future scientists, and understand their galaxy's past, just as astronomers here on Earth discovered that the Milky Way had previously seen small mergers with other galaxies, while at some point it swallowed smaller galaxies.
As for the future of these galaxies, perhaps these imagined astronomers will be able to predict the future features of their galaxy as well, as astronomers have predicted here, that our galaxy is on its way to a dramatic merger or radical transformation that will reshape almost everything after colliding with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda (or Serial Woman) that today appears to us as a spot of light manifested in the night sky. So, what exactly will happen is that about 5 billion years from now the Andromeda galaxy will be intertwined with us, and once that happens the spiral arms of our galaxy will disappear, as will our supermassive black hole.
These changes will occur in our galaxy, because the mass of our black hole is smaller than the black hole located at the center of the Andromeda galaxy, which is 100 million times the mass of our sun, so our black hole, which has a relatively smaller mass of only four million times the mass of our sun, will soon be swallowed. Astrophysicist Mingarelli says, "It will be like a quick swallowing process that won't take time and will soon end immediately."
Astronomers here predicted that our galaxy is on its way to a dramatic merger or radical transformation that will reshape almost everything after colliding with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda (or Serial Woman). (NASA)
Although intergalactic mergers will not lead to tangible change on an individual's personal level, they still provide an interesting environment for astronomers who may have the opportunity to witness their galaxy's merger with another. Contrary to expectations, being inside an isolated and untangled galaxy may have downsides, because according to astrophysicist Moya Macter, our planet's location on the Milky Way for example does not offer us the best view from which to study our parent galaxy.
"When we try to study our galaxy, we discover that what's at the forefront is the large amounts of gas and dust that hinder our observations, so we have to study other spiral galaxies to learn more about the behavior and evolution of spiral galaxies that resemble ours. "If you happen to discover another spiral galaxy closer to your own, and it appears at an angle where you can see most of its parts clearly, you will be able to study this galaxy much easier than your own."
On the other hand, if you happen to be an astronomer living in the midst of a galactic fusion, it will be, contrary to what you expect, very frustrating, because if you look at the horizon at night, you will discover that the sky is too crowded to spot distant objects. Astronomer Rodríguez Gomez concludes: "In such an environment, it would be difficult to have a clear view without pollutants from the fusion process between the two galaxies that would eventually result in a luminous galaxy that is supposed to be our home. If we give a little rein to our imaginations, we might imagine someone else observing our galaxy from their distant position in the midst of a radiant cosmic collision, and while contemplating they might end up sighing deeply in a quiet moment of daydreaming and asking, "What would it be like if the same thing happened here?"
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This article is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.
Translation: Somaya Zaher.