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Pastimes : SPACE THE FINAL FRONTIER -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (61)	7/26/2006 2:45:31 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 528

It will be about 3 billion years before they collide, but the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course! In about 3 billion years, the two galaxies will collide. Then over a span of 1 billion years or so after a very complex gravitational dance, they will merge to form an elliptical galaxy. The Milky Way Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a collection of about 400 billions stars spread out in a thin disk more than 100,000 light year across. Our sun is one of those stars sitting about midway out in the disk moving around with the others on nearly circular orbits. The Milky Way would look like an average looking spiral galaxy if we could see it from the outside. Andromeda The nearest big spiral galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda galaxy. Appearing as a smudge of light to the naked eye in the constellation Andromeda, this galaxy is about twice as big as the Milky Way but very similar in many ways. At the moment, it is about 2.2 million light years away from us but the gap is closing at 500,000 km/hour. While most galaxies are rushing away as the universe expands, Andromeda is the only big spiral galaxy galaxy moving towards the Milky Way. The best explanation is that the two galaxies are in fact a bound pair in orbit around one another. Both galaxies formed close to each other shortly after the Big Bang initially moving apart with the overall expansion of the universe. But since they are bound to one another, they are now falling back back together and one very plausible scenario puts them on a collision course in 3 billion years. cita.utoronto.ca * * *