New discovery about the "monster" Fairy that threatens to knock the Earth off its feet

(NLĐO) - Andromeda is the name of a giant galaxy that is on a trajectory to collide with the galaxy containing Earth.

A new study from the University of Helsinki (Finland), Durham University (UK), and the University of Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (France) has recalculated the probability of a collision between the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth, and its "neighboring" Andromeda galaxy.

Suspicions that Andromeda is attacking the Milky Way have been circulating since 1912.

The "monster" galaxy Andromeda will move closer to Earth in the future - AI illustration: Anh Thu

At that time, American astronomer Vesto Slipher discovered that the light from Andromeda had a Doppler shift towards the blue end of the light spectrum, indicating that it was approaching us.

Both Andromeda and the Milky Way are "monster" galaxies in the universe, having devoured many smaller galaxies to reach their current size. Andromeda is even slightly larger than the galaxy containing Earth.

Subsequent studies, including many conducted in just the last few years, have shown that this galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away, is hurtling towards us at a speed of 110 km/second. This helps to calculate that the collision could occur in about 4-5 billion years.

The collision of these two "monsters" is calculated to have the potential to deflect the orbits of the planets in our solar system and push our Earth out of the Goldilocks habitable zone. That would cause extinction, but of course, assuming Earth still has life and hasn't been swallowed by the Sun during its red giant phase.

However, calculations by a Finnish-British-French research team now show that the probability of a collision and merger between the two giant galaxies occurring within the next 10 billion years is only 50-50.

They argued that previous studies had failed to account for the "confounding factor" of the gravitational influence of other smaller galaxies within the local group to which the Milky Way and Andromeda belong.

This time, they used observations from the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes to estimate the mass, motion, and gravitational interactions of the four largest galaxies in the Local Group. These include the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and the Large Magellanic Cloud.

When they added in confounding factors, they found that the likelihood of collisions decreased significantly. And if collisions did occur, they wouldn't happen any sooner than 8 billion years from now.

Thus, Earth hardly has a chance to worry about that, because our parent star - the Sun - is expected to "die" within the next 5 billion years, and will certainly have a strong impact, if not a potentially destructive one, on the planet at the end of its life cycle.

Additionally, another galaxy predicted to collide with the Milky Way is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The collision is expected to occur in the next 2 billion years.

But this satellite galaxy is quite small, so its impact on the Milky Way won't be as great as Andromeda's; instead, it could become another victim of being swallowed by the Milky Way.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/phat-hien-moi-ve-quai-vat-tien-nu-de-doa-hat-vang-trai-dat-196240821092051408.htm