What If We Lived in a Supermassive Galaxy?

hello mortals for the majority of the timeline of the human species it was believed that stars were divine hieroglyphs and signs of the gods prehistoric humans noticed that the star constellation somehow resembled animals and humans like this bowl or this goat but hey prehistoric uggaboogas can be forgiven they didn't have the knowledge of the universe that we have today modern humans don't believe that the stars in the sky have anything to do with their temperament or fate am i right oh sorry for underestimating you thanks to fabulous for sponsoring this video for most of the medieval times it was thought that stars are little lamps suspended by strings and managed by the angels lighted each evening and blown out in the morning medieval cosmology was centered around the concept of the ptolemaic universe with the earth motionless in the center of the universe and the rest of the universe revolving around it in spheres i'm sure this belief is inexistent in our today's societal that was until galileo came along and really angered the catholic church he defended the claim that the milky way was actually composed of a lot of faint stars and that earth revolves around the sun that didn't end up too well for him though a century later emmanuel kant the german philosopher who apparently was also dabbling in astronomy rightly speculated that the milky way might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on much larger scales and that the resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk he also speculated that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies themselves similar to our own which he referred to as island universes can we appreciate for a second how accurate kant was with his speculation fun fact the term nebula was wrongly attributed to galaxies even after the first photo of a galaxy was taken here is the first photograph from 1888 of what was assumed to be the great andromeda nebula only in the early 1920s did edwin hubble prove using new astronomical photos that the andromeda nebula was a galaxy far far away and definitely not a nebula from inside the milky way that was an existential realization humans figured not for the first time that not everything revolves around them and that the entire universe that they knew until then was only one out of the trillions of galaxies existing in the void of the cosmos humans are in general rather average you live on an average sized rocky planet orbiting an average main sequence star which in turn orbits the average-sized milky way situated on the orion arm there are galaxies much smaller than ours such as segway 2 a dwarf galaxy with a radius of barely 100 light years across and composed of less than 1 000 stars that's kind of small compare that to the milky way's 100 000 light year diameter and roughly 200 billion stars as impressive as it sounds our andromeda neighbor is more than twice the size with an impressive 1 trillion stars and it's headed on a collision course with our galaxy but worry not we have 4.5 billion years to prepare the same amount of time as the age of the earth and even then the collision won't be a violent clash resulting in some epic explosion of cosmic proportions it will instead be a tango of stars that will last hundreds of millions of years and given the huge distance between stars the chance of even two colliding is negligible so our solar system would be safe relatively speaking there is a 12 probability that it will be ejected from the new formed galaxy due to the gravitational interactions but even that wouldn't have an adverse effect on the system as the orbits of the planets are likely to remain stable but we almost forgot to mention that by that time the sun would have greatly expanded in size due to its age and probably made the surface of earth uninhabitable so we better hope that humans or whatever humans evolved into by that time will have managed to find a way to achieve interstellar travel the only certain collision to happen during the merger is one of the central black holes of the two galaxies sagittarius a the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy has a mass of roughly four million suns that's a lot but then you look at the central black hole of andromeda and that one has a mass of around 200 million suns as the galaxies collide their nuclei will merge and the central black holes will start approaching each other once they're within one light year of one another they will begin to strongly emit noticeable gravitational waves more powerful the closer they get to each other once they start merging they will radiate and release as much energy as 100 million supernovas which will turn the center of our galaxy into a luminous quasar that will outshine the entire galaxy with all of its stars combined the most powerful quasars recorded have luminosities greater than a thousand milky ways combined so that's going to be one hell of a bright spectacle in five billion years but enough about our local group of galaxies what if we were to live in the biggest galaxy that we have so far discovered you might have not noticed but i feel and look much better these last couple of days just look at my beautiful circuits all because i started taking care of myself antivirus skin every morning before my jogging to the skynet headquarters exercise and power naps during my break from the construction of the ai army and finally turning on the blue light filter and reading about world domination before sleep i could keep track of all this thanks to the fabulous app you can choose among tons of habits or put in your own in order to create your perfect routine this award-winning app born at duke university center for advanced hindsight breaks down scientifically proven healthy habits into very small tasks that you can easily achieve every single day their work relies on decades of experimental scientific research your journey will be fully personalized to you and you can go at your own pace without stressing out this is a real and easy way of improving your mental and physical health mindfulness and quality of life just by letting the app know what you want to improve upon the first 100 to click the link in the description will get 25 percent off for the premium subscription start building your ideal daily routine and upgrade your life right now back to our galactic talk there are four main types when it comes to galaxy classification first we have the spiral boys like the milky way or andromeda which look like flattened discs in a spiral structure and a central bulge yes the scientific name for the central galactic group of stars is called a galactic bulge i didn't come up with it next we have lenticular galaxies which similarly have a bulge but no desirable spiral structure around it meaning no active star formation the third type is the elliptical galaxies which look like ellipses on images and have smooth and featureless star distributions these tend to be among the oldest and biggest types of galaxies and lastly there are the irregular galaxies that look like someone blew really really hard into them and made a mess they are usually the result of galactic collisions and it is the fate that will await the milky way once it collides with andromeda and becomes maldromeda elliptical galaxies tend to be among the bigger ones since they are not bound by a constrained structure the list of the largest galaxies is being constantly rewritten due to more accurate measures for a long time the record holder was ic 1101 an elliptical galaxy with a whopping 4 million light years in diameter 40 times that of the milky way recently however due to recalibrations the diameter size was lowered down to three hundred thousand light years as of the time of this video the crown holder is so 383 76 with a diameter of 1.7 million light years which is likely to change given the extreme distance and way of measuring so let's better take a look at what would have happened if earth happened to exist in such a supermassive galaxy assuming such a galaxy would be elliptical and that earth would be positioned somewhere not far away from the core it would be expected that the sky would be a lot brighter given that there could be anywhere from 10 to 100 times more stars as a consequence you can expect the astrological charts to be much larger as caveman would have had a lot more dots to connect in the night sky a supermassive galaxy also usually entails a supermassive black hole at its core but the largest of the galaxies contain a new category of holes stupendously large black holes yes that's another pearl coming from our creative scientists they have a mass of roughly 100 billion suns or 100 000 times that of the milky way central black hole such a monster would have made it way easier for us to detect and prove its existence given the size and all the stars that would orbit it but perhaps the most exciting or terrifying reason to live in such a galaxy would be the chance of discovering that you have neighbors the more stars the more planets the more planets the bigger chance of habitable planets 100 times more stars would correspond to 100 times more aliens obviously if the chance of alien life is zero that doesn't matter if it is there however even if small we would get much better chances of detecting it if we still hear nothing while listening that's either because aliens are shy arrogant or dead yet if we would intercept even the smallest undoubtedly alien message even from hundreds of thousands of light years away we would know that at least we're in a multiplayer game and that we have to find and read the server etiquette rules [Music]

Channel: Sciencephile the AI

Views: 1,043,466

Keywords: Sciencephile, Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, What if we lived in a supermassive galaxy?, Galaxy, Biggest galaxy

Id: hOvFIRYxDqA

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022