The collision between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy.
See also: Timeline of the far future, Milkomeda
Related to yesterday’s post about the night sky in 7 billion years.
This is beautiful and amazing and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Creationism — Its not appropriate for children.
THANK YOU Bill Nye, you really are THE SCIENCE GUY!
I’d vote for them! :)
That’s right, our favorite science guy (me excluded) is over at Reddit doing an IAmA! This should prove to be an awesome one … the questions are flowing in at warp speed, though:
Just in case he doesn’t get to your question, what would you ask him?
(Movies of jets from young stars at HubbleSite: here)
If you’re like me and maybe a little confused as to what you’re looking at, here’s some more detail (Yes, even Joe has to look stuff up sometimes):
As a star is formed from collapsing dust, ever increasing its density and energy, it begins to form a disk of dust and gas pulled in and rotated by its growing gravity. Perpendicular to this disk, like the tip of a spinning top, some gas is ejected away from the growing star in a high-energy jet. As this collides with interstellar gas, it gives off radiation, which we can observe with telescopes like Hubble.
To see the jets, we have to shift into the infrared and other spectra, as the radiation is outside normal human vision. These movies represent the first time we’ve seen the dynamics of the jets as opposed to still images. More info on protostellar jets here, you star-freaks.
Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.
Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it.”
