Astronomers believe that two large galaxies have already begun exchanging stars.
Astronomers now know that the Andromeda spiral galaxy, the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, is heading toward us. As a result, after a few billion years, our galaxy and its neighbor will collide and the process of merging the two objects will begin. But a recent study published on the preprint server arXiv shows that two galaxies began exchanging stars long before their merger was expected, Universe Today writes.
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Some people believe that stars are stationary objects, but they actually move. However, due to the vast distances in interstellar space, this movement is almost imperceptible.
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But there is a type of astronomical object called hypervelocity stars, and they are among the fastest objects in our galaxy. While these stars are flying in space at a speed of 1000 km/s, the Earth is moving in space at a speed of about 30 km/s. Astronomers discovered the first hyperfast star 19 years ago, and it has since been known that some of them may leave the Milky Way.
Typically stars move around the center of the galaxy. For example, the Sun needs 220 million years to make such a journey and make a complete revolution around the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers believe that the high speed of hypervelocity stars is due to the gravitational interaction between binary star systems and black holes. During this process, the star-mass black hole or supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy pulls one of the stars towards itself, while the other flies away at great speed. There is also a hypothesis that hypervelocity stars arise when one of the stars in the binary system explodes as a supernova. Another theory says that such stars are a product of gravitational interactions between galaxies.
To understand the interaction between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, the study’s authors had to perform a very careful analysis. They first needed to understand the relative motion of the two galaxies, then model the gravitational potential of the entire system. This is the total acceleration acting on an object at any point in every galaxy at any given time. Finally, scientists were able to create simulations of stellar motion to map the orbits of hypervelocity stars.
Scientists calculated the flight trajectories of 18 million such stars, and modeling showed that a small number of high-speed stars were moving away from the Andromeda galaxy and towards our galaxy. Astronomers found that most of these stars maintained approximately their initial speed, but some slowed down enough to be captured by the Milky Way.
The study’s authors plotted the simulated positions of stars on a map of space and compared the data to the positions of high-speed stars observed by the Gaia space telescope. The result revealed that the simulated distribution of star positions matched the Gaia data.
Astronomers have concluded that high-speed stars in the Andromeda galaxy may indeed be moving towards the Milky Way. Scientists say that even though these are not thousands of stars, they can still be detected.
As I already wrote FocusRecently, a “horned” comet flew past the Andromeda galaxy, which will be very close to Earth in June.
Moreover Focus He wrote about why the planet Uranus was discovered completely by chance. Interestingly, before Uranus was discovered, the planet was seen several dozen times, but was mistaken for another star.
Source: Focus
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