Spiral Metamorphosis

[Violerope]

good music. Boa musica.

[popnstart]

Will the Securities and Exchange commission approve such a merger? Can you say monopoly!?

[fleppleman]

For something that could be so destructive and violent from a great distance it would look beautiful, all that life, planets, stars getting thrown out into the emptiness between galaxies.

[ES350ES350]

One thing is for sure: mankind will not last that long (5 billion years from now) to witness the collision.

And the collision will occur over billions of years, not overnight.

[SporeCreator2009]

I would like that if someday in the future, Earth would be in the Andromeda galaxy instead of the Milky Way. lol

[WhoMelissa]

Beautiful.

[tastybrain]

This would make a cool screen saver.

[OutlawVR]

Most scientist don't think there will be life on earth in 3 billion years. Most give life another 1-2 billion years. Which is still a lot considering complex life has only been around for 0.5 billion years. In 3 billion years the sun will have gotten much hotter, the habitable zone will have moved past Mars, and all water on Earth would have long since evaporated into space. Sad but most likely.

But hell I give humans another 1000 years before we kill each other off. So lets worry about the now

[ObserversEyes]

@OutlawVR

I suppose one could posit a hypothesis that all intelligent beings pass through a risk period of self-extinction where their technology surpasses their biological instincts. I think humans entered that risk period about 1950 with the H-bomb. I think also that we'll be passed that risk in 1000 years ( at least I hope so ).

So, right now and the next few centuries is the make or break time for human civilization and human life. We do live in interesting times.

[Necronomichron]

Stars in Milky Way: 100-400 billion.

Stars in Andromeda: 1000 billion.

Probability of a star collision: <0.00001%.

I hate statistics.

[theb3s7]

@Necronomichron I believe that's because there's very much void (90%+) in both of the galaxies.. :)

[dmn12694]

"stragglers" correction

[dmn12694]

I agree that this cant be accurate. Wouldnt this be much more explosive because of all the stars in both galaxies including white dwarfs compact matter and giant blue stranglers? sure theres no air means no explosion and sound but when all the stars clash and end like a chain reaction wouldnt it create many super novas making this event much more devastating?

[chonunca]

The colision will not be so quick than in the video. And so much space shown in just little video.

Explosions than you talk on this time and space ladder are too quick, and too small to be seen.

Earth should be like a mite size on this video (maybe more little) our sun explosion should not be more sized than a little grain of sand in just a millisecond

[bluechao]

@dmn12694 There would be few if any collisions between ANY of the stars in the two galaxies as they merge. Though from afar they seem to be packed tight, galaxies are almost entirely empty, so odds are the suns would never touch. The galaxy acts like a single object on the macro scale, so stars' gravity affects each other, but the stars never need to get even very close to do that.

[bluechao]

Put it this way, if the sun was the size of a quarter, Proxima Centauri, the next closest star to us at 4.5 light years, would be something like 475 miles away. Put a quarter on the ground in San Francisco to represent the sun and the next closest star would be a nickle lying on the ground somewhere near San Diego.

[63verlaine]

On a deux milliards d'années pour y réfléchir. Mais quelque-chose me dit que nous nous serons auto-détruits bien avant :)

Te voilà "rassuré" ?

[lejimi2]

Et à Copenhague, ils vont signer quel genre d'accord pour arranger ça ?

[GreenTrystan]

xD Je respecte ce commentaire.

[DarthPickley]

These simulations probably cannot be completely accurate however because of several things we do not yet fully understand such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy, as well as effects from Chaos Theory. However none of these things except for possibly dark energy or even the existence of a "Dark Energy Galaxy" of some sort that disturbs the others somehow would significantly change the inevitable merging of the two galaxies. Mostly just details probably would be different.

[antiisaacbarbie17]

Oh thats gonna be a huge, violent, disastrous collision...

But thankfully it wont happen for another billion years eh?

[YTpandemoniumYT]

looks perfectly peaceful to me

we are GOD in this simulation

if anyone cared to notice

(so i liked that double)

[skuzzbunny]

the model is of course simplified... there would be a big boom of new star formation, and as mentioned, the super-massive black holes at the cores would combine and feed greatly for some time, causing mad gravity waves, and massive radiation near the core, and huge, ultra-powerfull jets out the poles... but here out on the arms it probably wouldn't effect us much, unless we passed through a jet and got fried!P might look rather pretty, tho.)

[albedoshader]

They did take star formation, temperatures and relativity into account. The degree of simplification is not as high as you might think. It's not a simple n-body simulation - far from it!

[albedoshader]

They made the same simulation from our sun's perspective and during the animation you can see that our position doesn't help to prevent a "catastrophe". The sun travels through the galactic core during the simulation.

[TomMinderson]

Mom, my foot went *that* way and my ass went *that* way...

[kuipervoid]

Wow, what I wouldn't give to witness this, to live for 5-6 billions years as a massive entity in the universe and watch this unfurl. Life on earth will most likely not exist when this happens as the Sun becomes a red dwarf, but hopefully our race will exist somewhere, in some form, and maybe watch this celestial event. Curse these 80-100 year lifespans that we have!! ;)

[aoejatounit]

Actually the sun will still exist in it's current state, and there will likely still be life, 3.5 billion years ago primitive organisms had photosynthesis, 3.5 billion years from now, well i cant imagine what life will be like in 3.5 billion years.

[CryoSporeFan043]

super intelligent omnipotent beings able to use intelligence wisely and unlimitedly. The "idiot" strain will be removed by that time (if it doesn't make us throw nukes at each other).

[Najmods]

I would like to see this happen, but I don't want to live inside the collision itself!

[flymolo20z]

So is there any way to know how long this process takes once the two galaxies begin to merge?

[albedoshader]

take a look in the info, there's a link to the original page. There you can get all the information and higher res videos.

[Mueiwark]

Hah, at least the Quasars can look forward to one hell of a feeding frenzy! Ofcourse, they'd need to have a go at one another at some point. It must suck to be anywhere near the gallactic core when the merger begins.

[DefenderofFuture]

It's really pretentious of all of you to think that we're even going to BE here in 3 billion years...that's all I'M saying...

[iloveesr]

Lighten up, dude! Are you oblivious to tongue-in-cheek humour?

[BlueYeti999]

Our solar system was actually part of another galaxy that merged with the Milky Way called the Sagitarius Dwarf Galaxy. I wonder what they will name the galaxy that is made out of this merger. I can think of one , the Corporate Sin Galaxy.

[BlueYeti999]

The next I mean.

[poindextroseify]

@BlueYeti999 No. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy consists of stars moving in orbits much different than those of the disk. Our Solar System shares orbital properties with other star in the disk. Therefore, our Sun likely formed in the disk of the Milky Way and has made about 20 orbits since its formation.

[SheikahZeo]

Say we get flung out into the intergalactic void like that video depicts happening to presumably innumerable systems, what kind of implication does that have for life on Earth?

[imooumoo4]

Absalutly nothing. It will be remote.

[worlebird]

Being flung into the intergalactic void would likely have little impact on life on Earth.

What could be a problem is if the orbit of the Sun is altered such that we swing through the galactic core on the way out.

If we did, it's quite possible that the intense radiation we would encounter there would end life on Earth completely. Of course, that's still 3 billion odd years in the future.

[eXcommunicate1979]

And there's a chance that life could evolve to cope with the radiation over the millions of years that such an event would take to occur. :)

[FionaTheFox]

Only 3,000,000,000 years? Wow, that doesn't even give the sun time to supernova. It makes me wonder, what will destroy the earth first? The sun becoming a red giant, or the Andromeda Galaxy collision?

[rounddeworld]

Research with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN is predicted to create a possible time machine, or even generate a black hole. Will we kill ourselves long before we need to worry about Andromeda?

[tunoddenrub]

The 'doomsday' predictions that are being bandied about are the same doomsday predictions that happened with the LAST big supercollider built, and are considered laughably improbable by people who actually know what they're talking about

[tunoddenrub]

The sun isn't nearly large enough to go supernova - only very massive stars will undergo supernovae at the end of their life cycles. The sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years (still after Andromeda will hit us), and then eventually throw off its outer layers into a planetary nebula, leaving the core to cool off as a white dwarf.

[SyphonFilter25]

I watched this in lecture ... while the lecture hall was dimmed... the music to it was just perfect. Really amazing effects.

What is the song?

[mbutchin]

Way cool. So, it'll take three billion years for the collision to occur. How many billions of years will it take to re-form a single galaxy out of the Milky Way and Andromeda?

[kauaikit]

Another billion years.