NASA Photographs Big Galactic Collision

[eddierox]

A major cosmic pileup involving four large galaxies could give rise to one of the largest galaxies the universe has ever known, scientists say.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/nasa-ph...00010000000001


Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars.

The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way.

"When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe," said study team member Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"Galaxy collisions are a common occurrence in the universe.
Our own Milky Way is fated to collide and merge with its neighbor, Andromeda in about 5 billion years."

[Spaz]

holy shit!!! how many light years across?

[eddierox]

holy shit!!! how many light years across?

Let me get back to you on some galactic abstracts pertinant to cosmic understandings ...

[FSANE]

Who cares. Humans will never get to see it.

[eddierox]

The Milky Way

The term "milky" originates from the hazy band of white light appearing across the celestial sphere visible from Earth, which comprises stars and other material lying within the galactic plane.

It is a barred spiral galaxy of a Local Group of galaxies within the Virgo Supercluster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe (between 1×1010 and 8×1010).
The Greek philosopher Democritus (450 BC–370 BC) was the first known person to claim that the Milky Way consists of distant stars.

The main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter, about 250,000 to 300,000 light-years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 2,300–2,600 light-years in thickness.

The galactic disk, which bulges outward at the galactic center, has a diameter of between 70,000 and 100,000 light-years.
The distance from the Sun to the galactic center is now estimated at 26,000 ± 1400 light-years while older estimates could put the Sun as far as 35,000 light-years from the central bulge.

The galaxy is estimated to contain 200 billion stars but this number might be as high as 400 billion if small-mass stars predominate.
As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the galaxy were reduced to 130 km (80 mi) in diameter, the solar system would be a mere 2 mm (0.08 inches) in width.

The Galactic Halo extends outward, but is limited in size by the orbits of the two Milky Way satellites, the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds, whose perigalacticon is at ~180,000 light-years.



New discoveries indicate that the disk extends much farther than previously thought.

It is extremely difficult to define the age at which the Milky Way formed, but the age of the oldest stars in the Galaxy is currently estimated to be about 13.6 billion years, which is nearly as old as the Universe itself.

This estimate is based upon research performed in 2004 by a team of astronomers: Luca Pasquini, Piercarlo Bonifacio, Sofia Randich, Daniele Galli, and Raffaele G. Gratton.
The team used the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure, for the first time, the beryllium content of two stars in globular cluster NGC 6397.

This allowed them to deduce the elapsed time between the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first generation of stars in the cluster, at 200 million to 300 million years.

By including the estimated age of the stars in the globular cluster (13.4 ± 0.8 billion years), they estimated the age of the oldest Milky Way stars at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years. (See also nucleocosmochronology.)






The Milky Way as seen from Death Valley

[98MustGT]

Eddierox - Nice pics

[joerockhead]

Yes Eddie, those are some great pics, but also some very interesting information!

thanks for the read. Just the idea of the size and Age are amazing!

13 BILLION years!!!!!!!! DAMN!

[NdrSiege]

When noone knows how old something galactic is, just guess in the billions and you must be right.