The gas in the Stream, and the Magellanic Clouds themselves, will someday collide with our Milky Way, astronomers say. Now – according to a January 8, 2020, presentation by astronomers at the AAS meeting in Honolulu – it appears that signs of this collision are already in evidence .
What will happen when the Large Magellanic Cloud collides with the Milky Way?
“The destruction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, as it is devoured by the Milky Way, will wreak havoc with our galaxy, waking up the black hole that lives at its center and turning our galaxy into an active galactic nucleus or quasar ,” lead author Marius Cautun, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Computational ...
When the Magellanic Clouds two nearby small ish galaxies are swallowed by the Milky Way galaxy what will happen to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way?
When galaxies collide
For starters, the colliding LMC would likely pour loads of fresh gas and stars into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, breathing fresh life into the once-sleeping giant.
What will the Milky Way collide with?
Supermassive black holes will merge less than 17 million years after galaxy merger. The Milky Way galaxy will merge with neighboring Andromeda (pictured) about 10 billion years from now — a bit later than previously estimated.
Will the Large Magellanic Cloud?
But the Milky Way may face another galactic threat before that, from a different neighbor. A new study predicts our galaxy will collide with a galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud between 1 billion and 4 billion years from now .
Can 2 galaxies collide?
The merging of galaxies will radically affect their shape. For example, two spiral galaxies can merge and form an elliptical galaxy. Sometimes even more than two galaxies can collide with each other. Although galaxies have a lot of starts, it is very unlikely that starts from both galaxies actually collide.
What is the largest type of galaxy in our universe?
The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101 , which is 50 times the Milky Way's size and about 2,000 times more massive. It is about 5.5 million light-years across. Nebulas, or vast clouds of gas, also have impressively large sizes.
Will Andromeda destroy the Milky Way?
That's because stars inside galaxies are separated by such great distances. Thus the stars themselves typically don't collide when galaxies merge. That said, the stars in both the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way will be affected by the merger .
Does the LMC have a black hole?
For instance, the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest of the “dwarf galaxies” orbiting the Milky Way, lacks a supermassive black hole . This also typically makes dwarf galaxies diffuse. The Large Magellanic Cloud has a relatively paltry 30 billion stars spread across 14,000 light years.
Does the Large Magellanic Cloud have a black hole?
The atypical brightness of the LMC is just one of the several features that make our galaxy stand out. For its bulge mass, the MW has a supermassive black hole whose mass is nearly an order of magnitude too small (Savorgnan et al. 2016).
Will humans ever leave the Milky Way?
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a disk of stars about 100,000 light-years across, and about 1,000 light-years thick. ... So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically , or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre.
How many black holes are in the Milky Way?
Most stellar black holes, however, are very difficult to detect. Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.
Is the Milky Way galaxy going to collide with Andromeda?
In roughly 4.5 billion years' time the Milky Way will smash into the rapidly approaching Andromeda Galaxy , and astronomers are still attempting to predict what it will be like when the two galaxies collide. That a collision between our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy is inevitable has been known for a little while.
Can you see the Magellanic Clouds with naked eye?
About the Magellanic Clouds
The LMC is the third closest galaxy to the Milky Way, at 160,000 light-years away. And at around 210,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is the furthest object us southerners can see with the naked eye during the winter months .
Where in the Milky Way are the youngest stars?
In a report by Futurism, a team of astronomers observed what they believe is the youngest neutron star 170,000 light-years away from Earth in a satellite galaxy of our very own Milky Way, which is known as SN 1987A.
