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The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been thought to be the dominant gravitational force in forming the Stream by pulling gas from the Clouds.
A new computer simulation by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues now shows, however, that the Magellanic Stream resulted from a past close encounter between these dwarf galaxies rather than effects of the Milky Way.
This plot shows the simulated gas distribution of the Magellanic System resulting from the tidal encounter between the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) as they orbit our home Milky Way Galaxy.
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
So maybe our solar system will have a visitor someday and maybe it won't be Nibiru but something else, like part of one of these dwarf galaxies?
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
I read that the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies are on a collision course with each other, and will "collide" in maybe about 2 billion years or so.
Looking at that top image, I have to wonder if the LMC is yet to collide with the outer part of the Milky way? Will it?
So maybe our solar system will have a visitor someday and maybe it won't be Nibiru but something else, like part of one of these dwarf galaxies?
Thanks, it's nice to know others find it interesting too!
Originally posted by Esoteric Teacher
Star & Flag Arbitrageur, with 5 cool points, too. I like learning new stuff, and I find this stuff interesting, thanks.
I think the timetable is known pretty well, at least we think so. That 4.5 billion year number may not be technically wrong but it's very misleading, I wouldn't quote that number to a layperson for that reason.
I think it is closer to 4 & 1/2 Billion years when our galaxies will collide (I had to look it up) , but who knows .... the time table could change.
So if our part of the milky way gets flung off into Andromeda in just 3.5 billion years, we don't want to be left thinking the collision wasn't supposed to happen for another billion years, right? The Earth will be too hot to support life by then but hopefully we will be inhabiting at least some nearby star systems by then.
There's also a small chance that our solar system will be swept from its home in the Milky Way and scooped up by Andromeda during an earlier close encounter, in just three-and-a-half-billion years.
The first close contact between the Milky Way and Andromeda will also come sooner than had previously been thought—just two billion years from now, say model creators T.J. Cox and Avi Loeb. Both scientists work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I don't know this for a fact, however I suspect that many of the galaxies in our local group will end up merging. That link I just posted has a good image of the local group.
I don't know. Can we do something about it if it is a problem? I don't know.
Thanks for the post Devino, that's interesting. I hadn't heard that theory, and I don't know about the Sagittarius galaxy claim specifically. But what I do know is that there is lots of evidence to support that many of the modern day spiral galaxies are the result of collisions. Here's a good article about that:
Originally posted by Devino
There is a theory that our solar system is actually part of another galaxy. Our position in this galaxy is the product of a collision between the Milky Way and Sagittarius galaxies, as per this theory.
I'm not so sure about that last statement saying the Milky Way doesn't show evidence of collisions, we don't have such a great view of our galaxy trying to look at it from the inside. So I'm not as confident as they seem to be that our galaxy isn't also the result of collisions of other galaxies.
Using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time, created a demographic census of galaxy types and shapes from a time before the Earth and the Sun existed, to the present day. The results show that, contrary to contemporary thought, more than half of the present-day spiral galaxies had so-called peculiar shapes only 6 billion years ago, which, if confirmed, highlights the importance of collisions and mergers in the recent past of many galaxies. It also provides clues for the unique status of our own galaxy, the Milky Way....
Although our own Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy, it seems to have been spared much of the teenage drama; its formation history has been rather quiet and it has avoided violent collisions in astronomically recent times. However, the large Andromeda galaxy from our neighbourhood has not been so lucky and fits well into the "spiral rebuilding" scenario. Researchers continue to seek out explanations for this.
Reading that made me wonder, of the 100+ exoplanets we have discovered, how many of those solar system orbits align with our galactic plane? I don't know!
For what it's worth I should point out that I think it has been "scientifically" debunked, as it were, but some questions still go unanswered.
Mainly why our solar obliquity is 60° to the galactic plane.
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
As that Wiki article points out there is some uncertainty about the collision. But if it happens, 2 billion years is when the milky way will start seeing the effects, as this series of images shows (It's from a Harvard website so it might be more informative than the Wikipedia article):
I'm not so sure about that last statement saying the Milky Way doesn't show evidence of collisions,
Reading that made me wonder, of the 100+ exoplanets we have discovered, how many of those solar system orbits align with our galactic plane? I don't know!
I wasn't able to find anything definitive yet, just a post from a guy who seems to know what he's talking about saying their orientation is pretty much random and in his next post, that the internet is full of nuts claiming otherwise.
...
I'm going to look into that a little bit more...
My guess is that what they are trying to say is that if a bicycle and a tractor-trailer collide, the tractor trailer won't think of it as a violent collision. If he didn't have his radio turned up too loud, he might wonder that that thump was. Saggitarius is a dwarf galaxy so I'm comparing it to the bicycle and the Milky way to the huge truck. Now when two big trucks collide, that's a violent collision, so I guess there have been collisions but maybe not considered violent if they weren't with anything big.
Originally posted by Devino
Well, we know that the Milky Way has been involved in galactic collisions, Sagittarius being the evidence of at least one such collision. Your linked article states that the Milky Way has avoided "violent collisions". Does this make all known collisions with the Milky Way non-violent?
Slim for just one, but multiply slim chances for one, times the huge number of potential gamma ray bursters and the slim chances of any one pointing at us, become a lot greater.
This is something I have also wondered about, all of this talk about GRB yet what are the chances of one pointing towards us?
If we can truly observe the orientation and determine that it's random (yet to be confirmed by my research), that doesn't mean we would necessarily know the answers to any of those questions. But I'll let you know if I find out anything about that.
I haven't found anything really good neither. If you do find something let me know because I have thought about this for a long time now. As for anyone claiming that these orientations are simply random and anyone claiming otherwise are "full of nuts" I would ask these questions.
Regarding what causes rotation, I think it's objects or gas clouds moving past each other, combined with the effects of gravity.
And that is precisely why we are looking for "dark matter", whatever that is.
Originally posted by Devino
It's obvious that there is a force present here that is unaccounted for. Call it dark matter/energy, plasma or even Aether but there is something here holding all of this stuff together that gravity alone can not explain. I think that this force might also be the cause of angular motion.
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
what started the idea of dark matter is that the rotation of galaxies isn't explained by what we see and what we think we know.
We are assuming the force is gravity and the dark matter is undiscovered mass,