We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience. This includes personalizing content and advertising. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of Cookies, Privacy Policy Term of use.
Video Player is loading.
Current Time 0:00
Duration 0:00
Loaded: 0%
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time 0:00
 
1x
461 views • November 9, 2018
video privacyPrivate

Crash of the Titans: Milky Way & Andromeda Collision

Kuting Feng
The three largest galaxies in our Local Group of Galaxies are our Milky Way along with the Andromeda (also known as Messier 31) and Triangulum (also known as Messier 33) galaxies. This scientific visualization of a computer simulation depicts their joint evolution over the next several billion years and features the inevitable massive collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. Hubble Space Telescope observations indicate that the two galaxies, pulled together by their mutual gravity, will crash together in a head-on collision about 4 billion years from now. The thin disk shapes of these spiral galaxies are strongly distorted and irrevocably transformed by the encounter. Around 6 billion years from now, the two galaxies will merge to form a single elliptical galaxy. The Triangulum galaxy continues to orbit the merged pair through the end of this computer simulation, though other computer models show it becoming part of the collision. The visualization covers 8.2 billion years into the future at 105 million years per second. Colors are representative: light blue for spiral galaxies (considered "blue" in astronomy parlance because of their active star formation) and orange-yellow for elliptical galaxies (called "red" by astronomers for their old stellar populations). A random background field of galaxies has been added to the simulation in order to indicate the camera motion through the simulation volume. Credit Gurtina Besla (Columbia University), Frank Summers and Roeland van der Marel (STScI)/NASA
Show All