Fri June 8, 2012 What Happens When Two Galaxies Collide?
Originally published on Fri June 8, 2012 12:57 pm IRA FLATOW,
HOST: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. If you look up in
the sky at night, especially later this year, you can spot the
Andromeda Galaxy, it's a small cloudy smudge in space. It's our
galaxy, the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor, about two and
a half million light years away. But if you keep watching it,
yeah, go ahead, over time, keep watching it night after night,
ooh, it's headed straight to us, but you're going to have to
watch it for a long time because - you have to crane your neck
for about four billion years before it smacks right into the
Milky Way. So how is this collision going to change our galaxy
and the solar system that we live in for that matter? Will there
be life on Earth four billion years from now? Here to talk about
it is my guest, Roeland van der Marel. He is an astronomer at
the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland,
and research appears i