From Dr. Becky.
AD – Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code DRBECKY at checkout. Download the Saily app or go to https://saily.com/drbecky | Will our Milky Way galaxy, our island in the universe of 100 billion stars, one day collide with our neighbour the Andromeda galaxy? Because when we observe the light from Andromeda, we see that unique features from light given off by the elements like hydrogen and oxygen are doppler shifted; the light from Andromeda is squashed as it moves towards us, and we see that as a shift of the light to bluer colours: a blueshift. From that we know how fast Andromeda is moving relative to us at 301 km/s towards us – so that means a collision with the Milky Way must be imminent in 2.5 billion years or so once we close the 10 billion billion km gap, right? Turns out, maybe not. A paper by Sawala et al. was published earlier this month claiming there’s actually only a 50% chance that the Milky Way and Andromeda will merge in the next 10 billion years. And it’s all thanks to our other closest neighbours the Triangulum galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud. So in this video we’re going to dive into all the details and chat first
00:00 Introduction
03:56 The members of our galactic backyard of the Universe
07:36 The simulations run by Sawala and collaborators
10:58 What has the biggest influence on whether the Milky Way and Andromeda will merge?
13:56 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
