Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Galaxy Evolution
Studies show that the Milky Way Galaxy is moving towards the nearby Andromeda Galaxy at about 130 km/s, and depending upon the lateral movements, the two may collide in about five to six billion years. Such galaxy collisions are fairly common, especially in dense galaxy clusters. Given the distances between the stars, the great majority of stellar systems in colliding galaxies will be unaffected. However, gravitational stripping of the interstellar gas and dust that makes up the spiral arms will produce a long train of stars, similar to that seen in NGC 250 or the Antennae Galaxies.Although the Milky Way has never collided with a galaxy as large as Andromeda before, evidence of past collisions of the Milky Way with smaller dwarf galaxies is increasing.Spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, only produce new generations of stars as long as they continue to have dense molecular clouds of interstellar hydrogen in their spiral arms. Elliptical galaxies are already largely devoid of this gas and so form no new stars. However, the supply of star-forming material is finite; as stars convert hydrogen into heavier elements, fewer stars will form.After the end of stellar formation in under one hundred billion years, the "stellar age" will come to an end after about ten trillion to one hundred trillion years, as the smallest longest-lived stars in our astrosphere, tiny red dwarfs begin to fade. At the end of the stellar age galaxies will comprise compact objects: brown dwarfs, black dwarfs, cooling white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Eventually, as a result of gravitational relaxation, all stars will either fall into the central supermassive black hole of the galaxies, or be flung into the depths of intergalactic space as a result of collisions.

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