Milky Way is still recovering from a mysterious impact
For those who are concerned about the consequences of a possible impact from our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, with the Milky Way galaxy in the distant future, here is news for you to put things in perspective: our galaxy is still recovering. from a hard blow that it suffered 100 million years ago.
Fermilab scientists analyzed about 300, 000 stars cataloged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped at least 35% of the known areas of the galaxy, and noticed something unusual: some nearby stars in the northern and southern parts of the Milky Way are out. in sync with each other.
Causes and consequences
The stars revolve around the Milky Way's flat disk at about 220 km / s, with small up-down movements at about 20 to 30 km / s. The motion of these stars should be symmetrical, but that is not what scientists realized.
For them, the explanation is that the Milky Way had had a strong impact at least 100 million years ago and these unsynchronized movements are nothing more than a reverberation of that impact. Although the causes of the collision are not yet known, the finding leads the researchers to two findings.
The first is that we are able to survive an impact, even if it will happen only 4 billion years from now. The second, and much more interesting to science, is the possibility of studying today what an impact such as this can have on the planets involved.
Source: LA Times
