The collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda, the two largest galaxies in the Local Group, will take place 4.5 billion years from now, as reflected in the first interactive map in the history of 1,400 galaxies in a span of 13 billion years, created by an international team of astronomers and that collects the Astrophysical Journal . In this cosmic collision, the two galaxies will merge into one creating a giant elliptical galaxy.
Both our Milky Way and the rest of the galaxies that surround us are in continuous movement. By trying to reproduce the history of the trajectory of the movement of our galaxy they managed to elaborate the most detailed map of our universe during almost all of its history, reflecting the orbits and movement of up to 1,400 galaxies 100 million light years away from the earth.
And all this, on an interactive map that makes it easier for us to understand the formation of this part of the cosmos and glimpse what the future holds for us.
The most detailed map of the universe
On the map, the orbits are represented thanks to an interactive 4D visualization , with which we can freely explore the model from any angle, as well as stop their evolution to see it in more detail or even go back in time that we are interested in. to see how it will evolve in the future. We will also appreciate the flows of spatial matter, for example, how the Local Void is losing matter.
Thanks to this avant-garde map, in which the trajectories of the galaxies have been calculated by the principle of least action (classical mechanics), we can know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has already traveled 30 million light years on its journey away from the region of the universe known as the Local Void.
This sparsely populated region, the Local Void, is a vast area stretching for about 150 million light-years and surrounding the Milky Way. Other inhabitants of this neighborhood of the Local Void are the Hercules superclusters and the Coma superclusters.
The fatal collision
The speed at which the Milky Way is moving is approximately 2.3 million kilometers per hour. This movement brings us closer to the spiral galaxy of Andromeda, setting our future in two completely opposite phenomena: gravitation and the expansion of the universe. Which one predominates in our case? Gravitation, hence we are heading for the collapse of the structures of both galaxies in 4.5 billion years.
As with navigation maps, this recent map of the universe is constantly updated by this same team of scientists, who in 2014 discovered Laniakea, the frontier of the continent of galaxies in which we all live, that is, the supercluster of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs and our entire solar system.
Reference: Action Dynamics of the Local Supercluster. Edward J. Shaya, R. Brent Tully, Yehuda Hoffman, and Daniel Pomarède, Astrophysical Journal 850 (2017) 207. DOI: doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aa9525
