In approximately four billion years, the Milky Way will no longer exist. Our home galaxy will collide and unite with Andromeda Galaxy, which is now located approximately two million light-years away.
A supermassive black hole could be the catalyst in a future possible collision between our galaxy and Andromeda. The crash would make the galaxies merge into a magnificent explosion of energy and star dust.
The Possible Collision Between Milky Way And Andromeda, Under Research
According to astrophysicist Hai Fu from the University of Iowa, our galaxy is moving toward a head-on collision with Andromeda, we just don't realize it. He also believes the macro-stellar movement has already happened before, throughout the entire history of cosmos.
Scientists have been aware for some time about the merging of the galaxies in the universe's 13-billion-year history, but the mechanics of these collisions are still unknown.
In an attempt to explain and describe this phenomenon, Fu will analyze supermassive black holes. As their name suggests, their mass is similar to one of a billion suns. This image is hard to imagine, as our sun is already a billion times the size of the Earth.
"Pairs of galaxies with accreting black holes are rare and difficult to find, and that's why we need such a large area to survey," noted Fu.
For a long time, astronomers were only indirectly informed about the existence of supermassive black holes. The most palpable evidence was the existence of quasars in the remote active galaxies. Quasars are the brightest objects in the known Universe.
"Observations of the energy output and variability timescales of quasars revealed that they radiate over a trillion times as much energy as our Sun from a region about the size of the Solar System. The only mechanism capable of producing such enormous amounts of energy is the conversion of gravitational energy into light by a massive black hole," according to the Swinburn University's website.
The current scientific belief is that large galaxies grow by "eating" smaller ones. Transferring this principle to black holes, these will most likely orbit each other until the merge occurs.
A Grant For The End Of Our Galaxy
The researcher's team won a three-year grant of $405,011 from the National Science Foundation to explore and characterize these cosmic events and occurrences.
Black holes don't always accrete. However, those that do absorb with great power any type of material around them. By doing this, they push the host galaxies closer together, according to Fu. As part of this process, the black holes release a torrent of energy, with intense bursts of light so powerful that they nearly obscure the galaxies.
Normally, this type of phenomenon should be easily observable, even from very large distances, but because of the dust brewed up in the merging activity we cannot properly observe them. The supermassive black holes do emit radio waves, which can be observed because they cannot be altered by the dust.
As part of the project, the researchers will analyze the radio-emission maps captured by the Very Large Array, a large community of astronomical radio observatories, and attempt to confirm the findings through optical observations.
