Here on Earth there are still a billion or two years before the oceans boil and the planet will become uninhabitable. The sun will heat up, turn into a red giant, burn the fuel in the core, will inflate their outer layers and shrink into a white dwarf. But there will be new stars that will Shine and keep the galaxy alive and well in the distant future. One day our galaxy the milky Way will cease to exist. Over time the stars will remain, will not remain their remains and even black holes. This is the cosmic story of our home in space.
Space the story of the death of our galaxy begins here and now. We can blindly look around, thinking that the milky Way (#1), Andromeda (#2, our older sister) and a bunch of unknown — our cosmic neighbors — this is our house, but it is just so much more. It’s time to explore what else is around us. Go.
#3. Galaxy Triangle
With a mass about 5% of the mass of the milky Way, it is the third largest galaxy in the local group. It has a helical structure, its own satellites and could be a satellite galaxy of Andromeda.
#4. The Large Magellanic Cloud
This galaxy is just 1% of the mass of the milky Way, but is the fourth-largest in our local group. It is very close to our milky Way less than 200,000 light years from us — and it is an ongoing process of active star formation, since tidal interaction with our galaxy lead to the collapse of gas and cause a new, hot and large stars in the Universe.
#5 – 7. The small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 3190 and NGC 6822
They all have a mass of from 0.1% to 0.6% of the milky Way (and it is not clear which one is bigger) and all three are separate galaxies. Each of them contains more than a billion solar masses of material.
#8 – 9. Elliptical galaxies M32 and M110
They may be “only” satellites of Andromeda, but in each of them more than a billion stars, and at mass they may even exceed the numbers 5, 6 and 7.
In addition, there are at least 45 other known galaxies are the smaller components of our local group. Each of them has a halo of dark matter surrounding it; each of them gravitationally bound to another located at a distance of 3 million light years. Despite their size, mass, and size, none of them will remain in a few billion years.
As time progresses, the galaxies interact gravitationally. They not only shrink due to gravitational attraction, but also interact with tidal. Usually we’re talking about tides in the context of the moon attracting the earth’s oceans and creates the tides, and this is partly true. But from the point of view of galaxy tides is less visible process. Part of a small galaxy, which is close to a, will be pulled with a greater gravitational force, and the part farther away will have less attraction. The result is a small galaxy will stretch and eventually break under the influence of gravity.
Small galaxies that are part of our local group, including the two Magellanic clouds and dwarf elliptical galaxies will be torn that way, and their stuff will be included in the larger galaxy, with which they merge. “So what”, you say. It’s not quite death, because the large galaxy will remain alive. But even they will not exist forever in this state. After 4 billion years, the mutual gravitational attraction of the milky Way and Andromeda will tighten the galaxy in a gravitational dance that will lead to a large merger. Although this process will take billions of years, the spiral structure of both galaxies will be destroyed, which will lead to the creation of a single, giant elliptical galaxy in the core of our local group: Mlekojedy.
A small percentage of stars will be thrown during such a merge, but the majority will remain intact, when this happens a large burst of star formation. In the end, the rest of the galaxies in our local group, too, will be sucked and will remain a big giant galaxy, poerava the rest. This process will occur in all associated groups and clusters of galaxies throughout the Universe, while dark energy is pushing the separate groups and clusters from each other. But this cannot be called death, because the galaxy will stay. And for a while, so be it. But the galaxy consists of stars, gas and dust, and all will ever come to an end.
Across the Universe of galactic mergers will take place tens of billions of years. During this same time, dark energy will take away them across the Universe to a state of complete privacy and inaccessibility. And although the last galaxy beyond our local group will not disappear until after the hundreds of billions of years, stars will to live. The longest-living stars that exist today will continue to burn their fuel in tens of trillions of years, and of gas, dust and stellar corpses inhabiting every galaxy will have new stars — although less and less.
When the burn of the last star, leaving only their corpses — white dwarfs and neutron stars. They will Shine hundreds of trillions or even quadrillions of years before goes out. When will happen this inevitability, we have brown dwarfs (failed stars), which randomly merge, re-ignite nuclear fusion and create a star light for tens of trillions of years.
When using tens of quadrillions of years in the future will extinguish the last star in the galaxy will still be some weight. Hence it cannot be called “true death”.
And yet the galaxy is not eternal. All masses gravitationally interact with each other, and gravity objects of different masses are very strange properties in the interaction:
- Re “approaches” and similar passages raise the exchange rate and pulse between them.
- Objects with low mass are ejected from galaxies, and objects with higher mass are immersed in the center, losing speed.
- Over a sufficiently long period of time, most of the mass will be thrown out, and only a small part of the remaining mass is rigidly attached.
In the center of these galactic remains to be a supermassive black hole in each galaxy, and other galactic objects were rotated around an enlarged version of our own Solar system. Of course, this structure will last, and since the black hole will be as big, it will eat everything what can reach. In the center Mlekojedy the object will be hundreds of millions of times more massive than our Sun.
But it will be the end?
Due to the phenomenon of Hawking radiation, even these objects will one day disintegrate. Will require approximately 1080 – 10100 years, depending on how massive will be our supermassive black hole in the growth process, but the end is coming. After that, the remains rotating around the galactic center, unleash and leave only the dark matter halo, which also may be arbitrarily dissociate, depending on the properties of matter itself. Without any matter will not be anything that we once called the local group, the Milky Way and other cute heart names.
How will the death of the milky Way?
Ilya Hel