The Andromeda Galaxy - Past, Present & Future Milky Way Collision! [OOTW]

in the early 20th century scientists were discovering spiral shaped objects found throughout the night sky one particular so-called nebula stood out to many like having been observed since the Dark Ages and different in structure to anything observed at the time the idea that this object may not be a nebula and maybe something much further beyond either at the edge of or even beyond our galaxy was considered by several brilliant minds of their areas it then fell to Edwin Hubble one of the greatest astronomers of all time to search the skies and derive an incredible conclusion that would completely change our view of the universe forever the images he took in his studies revealed faint stars in what was once thought to be a gas cloud and it was with this that we discovered the existence of other galaxies outside our own Milky Way Edwin Hubble presented this in his 1929 findings and told the world that we may be part of a universe of hundreds thousands or even millions of galaxies this all started off with the discovery of our closest neighbor Messier 31 more commonly known as the Andromeda galaxy a giant cosmic neighbor for our own host galaxy and shrouded with mystery fueling dozens of fascinating discovery that have helped us shape our understanding of space today we'll be visiting our galactic counterpart as we analyze the past present and future of the andromeda galaxy the andromeda galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately two and a half million light-years from our own is the nearest galaxy to us and is twice as large as our own survey estimates hold that the andromeda galaxy may be home to one trillion stars anywhere from two and a half to four times as many as our own it appears in the constellation of Andromeda as a faint smudge in the sky hence its common name is also known as Messier 31 M 31 and NGC two-two-four it has a visual magnitude of 2.3 and hence is the brightest of the Messier objects in the local group you can see it in the sky with the naked eye on a clear night but not with much detail it appears as a small smudge but that is just the area on which light is being emitted from a recent discovery found that andromeda has an enormous network of gas clouds surrounding it which cannot be seen due to their dark nature these are so massive however that if they were illuminated Andromeda's diameter would appear as upwards of 20 times the moon's diameter in the night sky roughly estimated to be 220,000 light years across it is the largest galaxy in our local group by far it is also known to have around 20 smaller satellite galaxies orbiting around it as scientists believe that approximately 10 billion years old there is evidence to suggest that Andromeda was formed due to a collision with another galaxy that we are now witnessing the latter stages of its core has a supermassive black hole like most galaxies and radio telescopes have picked up potentially dozens of black holes of varying sizes floating around in its local region for something so far away we know a lot about this galaxy but that hasn't always been the case it's taken many years of studying and incorrect conclusions and approximately a millenniums worth of research so let's look at how that all began the earliest recording and noting of the Andromeda galaxy is as far back as an astonishing 964 anno domini it was named a nebula smear by the astronomer al rahman al sufi in his novel the book fix stars star charts at the time labelled it as a little cloud thereafter andromeda is visible to the naked eye thanks to its visual magnitude but not enough to see any detail to determine what it is it remained under this description for the next 650 years in 1612 however German scientists and philosophers got it on their radars and speculated over its existence for the next 70 years in 1755 Immanuel Kant published a paper named Universal Natural History and the theory of the heavens in this paper he described the finding as an island universe denied at the time to be sure but given their current understanding of the universe during that period he was much closer to the realistic hypothesis than anyone thought about a decade later Charles Messier catalogued the object as Messier 31 a named scientist still used to refer to it today fast forward 20 years to 1785 and astronomer William Herschel found a fake hue in the core while studying the object and concluded albeit incorrectly that this visible detail must mean that andromeda may have been the nearest of all the great nebulae estimating its distance to be only 2,000 times farther than that of sirius and nearby star in 1850 the first ever drawing of Andromeda spiral structure was made this allowed for William Huggins to know 15 years on that the color spectrum of Andromeda was different to a lot of other gaseous nebula that have been recorded this finding was investigated further and the spectra of Andromeda was noted to be continuous in frequencies closely Mira king the spectral behavior of individual stars and rahmanir was from then on classified as a stellar object in 1855 we believe that a supernova was observed within the andromeda galaxy known as s Andromeda the only known occurrence of this from that region to date this supernova was dismissed however as a dromeda was thought to be much nearer to earth at the time so the far-reaching and dimmed out visuals of the supernova were dismissed as regular and over activity in 1887 Isaac Roberts took the first ever photographs of the galaxy but it was still being mistaken for a nebula within our own galaxy which was widely believed to be the only star structure in the universe at the time it wasn't until the 20th century when great minds some technological advancements and wider interest prompted some progress to be made towards the truth veering in the direction of one of the most sensational discoveries in mankind's history in 1917 peeper Curtis observed a nova within the Andromeda galaxy this caused him to return to old photographs and records he found eleven recorded instances of Nova's all with an average of ten magnitudes fainter than those observed anywhere else in the night sky this led him to reevaluate the distance of the so-called nebula and reassessed it to be about five hundred thousand light-years from Earth he then became an advocate for the thousand-year-old island universe theory which now held that the spiral nebulae were in fact large groups of stars beyond our own at the time the concept of multiple galaxies had not yet been hypothesized in 1919 none other than the great Edwin Hubble attempted to tackle the question of exactly what this thing was he used the 100 inch hooker telescope located at the top of Mount Wilson in California to take light gathering pictures of the unidentified object to try and add some more clarity in a growing debate and his findings did not disappoint as for the first time faint stars were revealed a year later in 1920 the great debate between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis took place this was a big event for astronomy and everything was debated from the nature of the Milky Way to spiral nebulae to the universe's dimensions Curtis pushed his idea of the Andromeda nebula being actually another galaxy or some sort of star structure beyond our own more evidence of this had been stacking up to prove him right - including observations of significant Doppler blue shift in 1922 ernst Opik estimated the distance of andromeda via new methods of star velocity calculation and placed there a massive one and a half million light-years from Earth in 1925 Hubble closed the debate for good and dismissed the nebula theory completely when he identified extra galactic Cepheid variable stars stars that pulsate in photos that he took at the galaxy his final measurements were made with the hooker telescope again and this time conclusively proved that this structure was not able to be within our and with a thousand years worth of information to digest and a staggering conclusion determined Hubble set to work finalizing his findings in a paper in 1929 he published these findings claiming that other galaxies existed outside of our own and not only Andromeda but there may be more loads more this paper completely changed our view of the universe thereafter the andromeda galaxy was studied surveyed and stripped back in 1943 well too bad identified two distinct type of stars in the central region one type was a high-velocity type 1 star and the other was a type 2 older more redder star in the Bulge this information helped us to better understand our own galaxy and how it came to form to a job adore was the scientific gift to keep on giving finally in 1950 the first radio emissions from the galaxy were detected and as such the first radio Maps were made within that decade all this research provided the stepping stones to another sensational astronomical discovery in 1995 when the Hubble Deep Field image was created revealing hundreds of galaxies within a pinprick of the visible sky suggesting the existence of not just hundreds but hundreds of billions of galaxies all this was made possible by Andromeda but for how long is our galactic neighbor going to be able to keep being kind to us as I mentioned earlier the andromeda galaxy was most likely formed by two former galaxies colliding and creating this one a violent past but it's not finished here in space objects with gravitational fields are attracted to one another on a number of scales and hence it seems as if Andromeda isn't done ramming into its cosmic neighbours gesture and who's next on the collision course you guessed it us the Andromeda galaxy is heading right for us an alarming speed however there's a long time to go yet in approximately four and a half billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide head-on forming a new much larger elliptical galaxy how do we know this well there are a few telltale signs but let's consider the main one the Doppler effect this phenomenon describes the effects on different kinds of waves when compressed and dilated think of a car driving past you as it comes towards you the sound of the engine will be much higher-pitched and straight after it passes the engine drops to a much lower pitch this is because as the vehicle moves towards you so does the sound emitting and the sound waves are being pushed together and are a high frequency and when it moves away the waves are further apart obviously the speed of sound is limited to quite a slow speed that we've even surpassed here on earth you would never experience such an effect with light locally however out there in the universe where we are dealing with enormous objects and tremendous speeds it's the same with stars we know the universe is expanding as almost fact and for all intents and purposes in this video everything in deep space is receding away from us hence light waves are spread out rather than noise effects for light light goes to one of two colors to a mild to dark red when the object is moving away hence why a lot of the universe you look at in the deep field and Beyond appears to be red and then there's the other form the blue shift when light waves are slightly compressed they appear a faint blue now look at the end rahmatu galaxies most of his stars are supposed to be red and white yet multiple images show it appearing with a blue tinge as stated there are a few other reasons why we know the Andromeda galaxy is coming our way but this is a very dialed down version of one of the main giveaways Andromeda is moving towards us about 110 km/s extremely fast however these galaxies and the distance between them are so big that the effect is almost infinitesimally small it will take a full four and a half billion years before we collide with Andromeda but if you think there is some enormous Cataclysm immediately as this happens with billions of stars colliding then think again while galaxies are filled with billions of stars they are also comprised of huge amounts of empty space just think of the distance between us and our nearest neighbour Proxima Centuri 4 light-years away from us that's 19,000 years travelling in the fastest man-made craft ever to travel there is so much empty space within the two galaxies that despite what it may look like the majority of stars in both galaxies will remain untouched including our own solar system most likely however all is not that well as at some point in the following 3 billion years after the collision starts the supermassive black holes at the center of each galaxy will merge this will be a cataclysmic event as a certainty as the two most dense were massive parts of each galaxy they will move towards each other faster relative to the network of clouds within the galaxy this alone will start throwing stars out at the forming mega galaxies by the time the black holes are within a Lightyear of each other the gravitational way emitted will be extremely strong guests taken up by the combined forces could even create a quasar which will release as much energy as over 100 million supernova explosions black holes colliding is like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object and is something we've only been able to guess at this will quite scarily all be happening in our own backyard in 2006 simulations suggested that the Sun might be brought nearer to the center of the two collide engi cause if it survives the black hole collision it will either be swallowed up or ejected out a pretty grim fate for us either way but don't worry because even if the human race is still around by this point we'll have much bigger problems earth will be no longer habitable with its surface temperatures being likened to that of Venus during this era these images show how Andromeda will move towards us over the next few billion years and they make for some pretty spectacular viewing the discovery of dark energy in 1998 has made the expanding universe complicated - in very basic terms the speed of expansion has been increasing and eventually distant galaxies receding away from us but we'll be moving faster the light speed this means that at some point in time all the remaining galaxies that are bound by gravity in our region of space will merge together including our new union galaxy milky dromeda everything else will be lost over the cosmic horizon forever quite a terrifying thought but at least we'll have our own new super galaxy as a home after that if anything is even around by this point obviously studying the Stars is tough and Andromeda is out of the question it's so far away that we cannot study it with any great detail on a stellar basis however improving scientific methods have allowed us to gain more understanding of the galaxy could we observe planets around it with a telescope well no is this your answer telescopes of any size above what would be required to view its small objects on the moon's surface are financially spatially and materially impractical back for an orbiter it gets worse to see a planet in the Andromeda galaxy with any great detail we'd need a telescope with a mirror of approximately six and a half million kilometres across that's a full six tons worth of diameter suddenly building a Dyson Sphere doesn't seem that stupid anymore no instead radio telescopes are used for deep space observation in 2009 we think we may have detected the first-ever planet within the andromeda galaxy using a principal named gravitational microlensing hence any great detail escapes us and always will from our current position for a number of unchangeable reasons this means that even with 1 trillion stars with at least a few probably supporting planets of microorganisms dinosaurs humans and intelligent life we will simply never be able to see it or pick it up our only option would be to travel there and that's a whole other video in the meantime all we can do is just look up at the sky and wonder at the brilliance of our universe thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video if you did please smash a like on it and if you could - consider subscribing if you're new around here that then it would really help both me and the Chum now thanks a lot guys I'll see y'all soon

Channel: SEA

Views: 297,491

Rating: 4.8863459 out of 5

Keywords: Sea 1997, Maps From Hell, Conspiracy Cases, Sea1997, G-News, Sea, 1997, Space, OOTW, Out of this world, astronomy, science, andromeda, the andromeda galaxy, documentary, andromeda collision, collision, milky way, messier 31, m31, 4k, from earth, nebula, the great debate, edwin hubble, si-fi, andro, galaxy, local group, black hole, simulation

Id: h6JH_ed1zus

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018