The Galaxy Which Will Be The End Of The Milky Way....

Published Jul 19, 2021

2 mins read

403 words

faiz.shaikh

Phoenix

Welcome or welcome back my dear bloggers to my daily blogs. I hope you all are in good health and are having a blast of a day.💙

So today, we will be talking a but about space, more specifically, galaxies. Let us first define the term “ galaxy”- it is a gravitationally bound system of celestial bodies which includes stars, interstellar gas, dust and dark matter. Now we all know the galaxy we live in which is The Milky Way. This milky way is the galaxy that includes our solar system and we are about 26,000 light years away from the centre of our own galaxy. But we won't be talking about that for now… Do you know that there are about 125 billion galaxies in just the observable universe, imagine how many universes could be there in total and how large is this universe. Isn't this so crazy??

Lets talk about another galaxy, The Andromeda Galaxy, which is also called Messier 31, M31 or NGC 224. This galaxy is a spiral bound galaxy and is about 2.4 million light years from us, Earth. Andromeda galaxy is the closest major galaxy to our milky way. It has been observed that the number of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy is at one trillion, which is 1 x 10¹², more like twice the number in milky way. on top of that, it has 1 trillion stars.

The craziest part is that The milky way and the andromeda galaxies are expected to collide in about 4-5 billion years. The collision will result to form a giant elliptical galaxy.

Can you see this andromeda galaxy from earth???

Apparently yes, you can see a few other galaxies too without even using a telescope. Andromeda is bright enough to be visible by the naked eye on a dark and moonless night. It can be seen as two streams of stars from one side of the Square and the star Alpheratz. Now imagine a line between these two stars, that is where the andromeda galaxy is visible. These constellations of Andromeda is best visible in winter and fall in Northern Hemisphere and in late september and october from the Eastern sky just after the sunset.