The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group—the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The stars involved are sufficiently far apart that it is improbable that any of them will individually collide so if life is still in either galaxy they should survive but they will have some insanely beautiful views in the night sky! I took this a few weeks back with my eos and 50mm lens 100 2 minute exposures 1600 ISO stacked and edited with Deep sky stacker and siril.

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Very nice. But what do you use to take this image? Digital camera or telescope? Give some details

You're gonna gets Herms if you don't cover up them pinholes.

I know I'm on Reddit too much but how weirdly coincidental that I was just wondering what would a good name be for the galaxy after the eventual merger. Then bam, here you are. I think I'm becoming psychic.

Is this an actual picture or a creation of yours?

Never thought I'd see a crossover of weed growing and astro photography.

Actually, now that it's said, it makes sense.

Jesus Christ the night sky looks soooooo crowded. But all those stars are light years apart from each other. Space is incomprehensibly large.

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I suddenly have an urge to visit a planetarium.

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What kind of joke is this ☠️

Picture with my eos and 50mm lens 100 2 minute exposures 1600 ISO stacked and edited with Deep sky stacker and siril.

Coming soon in 4.5 billion years, roughly equivalent to 0.098 Cyberpunk developments cycles.

To help in understanding how far away we are from Andromeda.... you can fit about ~23 Milky Ways, or ~11 Andromedas, from end-to-end in between the 2 galaxies currently. The diameter of the Milky Way id around 105,700 ly, while Andromeda is 220,000 ly in diameter.

Whiles its an unimaginable distance on a humans scale, they are basically right next to each other on a Universal scale.

In another random bit of info... the Observable Universe is around ~880,000 Milky Ways across.

And humans want to travel that at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Talk about taking a rock to the windshield lol.

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Anyone know what those 5 perfectly spherical objects are directly in the void directly in center of shot? Something transiting in front of camera or something else?

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It is believed that our galaxy is already merging slightly with andromeda

Good chance that some stars are flung out into the void though. Imagine being a young civilization in one of those, your understanding of the universe would be pretty handicapped.

I don't think that is true? Both galaxies have diameters of around 100k-150k light years but are 2.5 million light years apart.

Can you convert that to half life 3s?

There was this news about the galactic halos (? I think) of both maybe being way bigger than previously thought, and if they are as big as the new calculations showed, then yes, the two galaxies would technically already be touching. The actual collision is still way ahead of us tho.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1349542/milky-way-andromeda-galaxy-merger-underway-astronomy-space-news-evg

Here is an article that suggests the galaxies may already be a touching

This is exactly why I believe the Fermi Paradox is bullshit. Space is insanely and wildly beyond-belief-large. The only way that there ISN'T life out there is if the vastness of space is part of what keeps us happy and unaware of "The Simulation".

"Slightly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/andromeda-brighter-youd-see.html

I wasn’t putting this up for debate, I said “it is believed” not “it is a fact” or “andromeda is already merging”

I was simply stating what I’ve seen.

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But the fact is that we just don't know how common life is (and more importantly intelligent life). Currently we have a sample size of one and that isn't enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Life has to come from something and the stark reality may simply be that for all those variables to come together in the perfect sequence and environment may not be as easy as we might imagine.

Is it going to just as buggy?

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The Fermi Paradox is a paradox because he expected more life than what we have detected so far. There is 100% life somewhere else but not necessarily within the Milky Way. We just do not have enough information to accurately determine the odds of life.

We have insanely beautiful views now but our insane light pollution has obscured this natural wonders for billions of people.

it's basically already spooning us

That was actually less than I expected but yes, 95 billion by 105 000 is about 880,000. 👍

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Even within the mily way there could be life, there could be life in Proxima Centauri, there could be life in Jovian moons.

Our detection isn't great, I think if we had an Earth clone in Proxima Centauri it would be hard to detect it has industrial life on it with any real certainty.

The Fermi Paradox originally assumed abundantly clear evidence like intentional attempts at contact from all intelligent life. It also only addressed intelligent life.

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This is a great and very accessible Fermi paradox article for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Edit: fun sense of scale quote from the first page: ….for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

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Just wait. It won't be long before the two actually are colliding.

Better set up your gear now, it's only two billion years in the future.

Believe it or not. We currently lie in the biggest super void known in the universe.

Thank you for this fantastic article!

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>But the fact is that we just don't know how common life is (and more importantly intelligent life). Currently we have a sample size of one and that isn't enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

That's fine, but the baseline statement of the Fermi Paradox is "if there are aliens, why haven't we heard from them?" as if we should have or even could have by now. It makes some serious presumptions about interstellar communication, interstellar travel, the proclivities of aliens engaging in either, and whether they even care about us enough to try and engage with us. Because make no mistake, anything we get from an alien race will almost assuredly have to be a deliberate attempt at communication; local TV and radio signals are far too weak to survive the interstellar void before degrading into indistinguishable background radiation.

Any message we receive would have to be deliberate, and that means that they would have to 1) have spotted us first, 2) recognized that we are a life-carrying planet, meaning their observational technology is at least better than JWST, 3) sent a signal exceptionally powerful enough via tight beam to survive the journey and be recognizable, 4) last long enough for our receivers to be able to parse it from the noise and identify artificial patterns, would need to 5) practically bullseye the solar system as it travels thousands of kilometers per second through the galaxy potentially hundreds of light years away, and we'd need to hope 6) that the Earth is on the correct side of the sun when the signal reaches the solar system so that it doesn't get drowned out by solar radiation, 7) that our receivers are aiming in the right direction at the right time for the right duration, and 8) that during it's travel through the void it doesn't get blocked by some unforeseen object like a black hole. This is all assuming they even use radio.

The amount of things that have to go perfectly right for us to receive a signal are insane; the WOW signal got only partially recorded because the receiver that picked it up was fixed and moved with the rotation of the earth, turning the receiver away from the signal just as it started picking it up. We may literally have missed an alien communication because we just lacked the technology to keep our ear on it for long enough, and it reached us at the wrong time.

We would likely need some kind of space-based radio observatory constellation network to truly survey the void for signals in a manner that leaves little room for doubt. And again, this is communication over vast interstellar distances, which creates its own problems. A 50,000 year old interstellar empire could be engaging in stellar engineering on the other side of the galaxy, and if they're 60,000 light years away, we will be physically incapable of ever knowing about them for 10,000 years. 10,000 years is far, far longer than the timescale upon which we'd been searching for alien life when Fermi asked "where is everybody". What would we have to say for ourselves when, after 9,999 years of not hearing anything, we conclude that we are alone, only to then get the very first light from a sequence of artificially induced stellar collapses on the other side of the galaxy? How foolish would we be, then, to have spuriously decided we were alone when even 9,999 years is a blip on the scale of space and time that separates us from our possible neighbors. At these scales, we will never be able to conclusively state we are alone from the sole vantage point of Earth; surrounded by 400billion stars in our galaxy alone, it would literally be faster and more productive to develop interstellar travel and just go look, than it would be to try and talk ourselves in circles around hypothetical fermi paradoxes, drake equations, and other probabilities all formed out of a sample size of 1 planet.

It's true that the we simply don't know, empirically, but the Fermi Paradox seems to take a presumptuous stance on the subject by implying we're alone and life must be rare simply because, in the vanishingly short amount of time we've been even capable of searching with anything resembling earnest (like, a few decades), we would have heard something. It's the equivalent of our cavemen ancestors approaching the shore for the first time, tasting the water, vomiting, and concluding that the water is poisonous and nothing could possibly live in the ocean simply because we couldn't do it ourselves--when a whole universe of life in fact lives just out of sight, oblivious and uncaring about either our ignorance or our arrogance.

By that token, the paradox makes some sweeping assumptions about the efficacy of interstellar communication to begin with. Space is big, and interstellar communication almost impossible unless both parties already know and are already expecting communication. Establishing first contact across interstellar distances is like trying to shoot a bullet out of the air with another bullet fired from two different guns in two different states; you'd need an exceptionally powerful gun with even more exceptional precision. And the other guy has no idea you're aiming at him. But you, the shooter, are doing on purpose; two bullets don't collide by chance. First Contact happens when one civilization already knows about the other one before hand and so they send a deliberately overpowered signal to reach out.

It's possible, to be clear, and hell it may have already happened. We just haven't been listening long enough to know.

Idk about that, to be in a rogue solar system you'd have a completely unfiltered view of the whole universe, like a night sky without light pollution. Imagine being able to view the universe we can't see because the Milky Way's zone of avoidance blocks it from our sight.

Thank you for this - extremely interesting read that I intend to deploy with my kids later and shatter their fragile perspectives with 👍. Take my award!

Care to elaborate?

God fucking damn its pics like this is why i love space so much. I could look at this for hours and find something new like every 5-10 mins

Wouldn't JWST be able to detect breathable air in that planets atmosphere?

We don't know how likely or unlikely the first abiogenesis event was. It could've been a once-in-a-galactic-supercluster coincidence. And then lots of the evolutionary steps since then were nowhere close to guaranteed.

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Dude wrote a whole nobel prize winning essay to prove a point. Probably the most mind blowing and convincing thing I have ever read.

Every spec is a star surrounded by multiple planets. Yeah we are alone. Suuuuure.

Your brain has a tremendous amount of surface area. Ya done good with this.

I feel like one of those primitive tribesmen that only have four numbers: 1, 2, 3, and "many."

This shows many stars, way many, many to the power of many.

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That's fucking insane. How can anyone honestly believe that we're alone? Jeez

To give some more thoughts on the matter, much is often said about the probability of life in the universe, and the possibility of life's emergence in any given scenario. Leaving aside for a moment that developing probabilities with a sampling size of 1 is ludicrous at best, the method behind the conclusions--reverse engineering the requirements for life to evolve at least as we understand it to get some idea of what might likely be out there--can be flipped in the other direction.

We know, from our experiences, at least a little of what it takes to develop life. As far as we can tell, life on earth emerged from a single ancestor, which is to say we have one tree of life on earth that traces its roots back to a common ancestral microbial organism from which all life emerged, and all life shares family with. This original life form is an "emergence event" for life. Should life exist on Mars or Europa or even early Venus (which likely was a water world), it too would have had one emergence event similar to ours, and that life will have evolved along its own branching paths in its own tree of life. What then does it take to develop intelligence out of a microbial organism?

Because the discussion around the search for aliens usually implies the search for other intelligences, ones capable of using technology to communicate over vast distances, develop civilization, and explore the cosmos. Microbial remnants on Mars, aquatic animals on Europa, or whatever might have existed on Venus 500million years ago wouldn't be the holy grail first contact scenario we like to envision, though such discovery would completely change our understanding of life in the cosmos more generally; in one solar system, life will have had up to potentially four distinct emergence events, maybe more. The next question one might ask is, what happens if life emerged more than once on a single planet?

But our concern is with intelligence. Intelligence on earth had its own, distinct emergence event about 200,000 years ago with the emergence of homo sapiens. The thing is though, depending on how you define "intelligence", Earth may have had more than that. If you define intelligence as the capacity to make and utilize tools fashioned from the environment to better improve the odds of survival, than numerous species across the Earth already engage in that, from small maki monkeys using basic hammering implements, to Otters building dams, to other primates using weapons. Even homo erectus and other sub phenotypes of humans, distinct from Sapiens, used tools and built small communities; they now remain silent, but they existed nonetheless.

If you define intelligence as the capacity for language and communication along complex social structures or the ability solve complex problems, again, we see that all over the world, most notably in dolphins, who use a truly complex communication style to form sophisticated battle strategies in either hunting or playing, form social structures, and seem to hold very human like feelings for others--good or ill. And of course, primates have been able to learn sign language to communicate with humans. They even have senses of humor, and it's been argued they even have names.

If you define intelligence as self awareness--or sentience, the ability to recognize ones own feelings either physical or emotional as oneself--we see that everywhere. Dogs, parrots, primates, dolphins, elephants, and many more can look in a mirror and acknowledge that they are themselves, the foundation of consciousness, what one might call the soul.

And if you define intelligence as the capacity to develop civilization, and claim that humans are distinct in that category of all life on earth, than I would argue that civilization is merely the cooperative expression of beings that build with tools, communicate with language, and recognize oneself in the mirror as distinct from others in the group. In my view of the Earth, intelligence has had not one emergence event on Earth, but in fact dozens of emergence events, with humans being the obviously most advanced--but nonetheless only the greatest among many.

And at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I can't even say with certainty that we were the first. We have no direct evidence of intelligence before us, but we also can't discount the possibility; intelligence's frequent reemergence in our tiny window of time would suggest that complex life naturally lends itself to complex, problem solving brains that lend further to the emergence of intelligence. What, then, may have existed 66million years ago, just before the fall of the dinosaurs, when the oxygen was richer and the life on it larger? What may have looked up at the stars and wondered to themselves--in their capacity to understand that they are themselves--what else might be out there, and what else might yet come?

In this view, while we can't say for certain how common life is, we can say with some degree of certainty that, where life does emerge, intelligence is not that far behind.

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The research linked seems to focus on the gases surrounding galaxies. The article seems to want to refine what the edge of a galaxy actually is to make the claim they are already merging to get the clicks. I'm not sure exactly how the edge of a galaxy is defined, but if you screw with the definition enough you can claim the entire observable universe is merging.

Happy Cake day btw!

Some cultures have patterns in the dark spots as there are too much stars

Nothing beats my 4 year old saying... "but dad.... There are too many to count" ya kid, let that marinate for 30 years and get back to me

True I mean it is a news site. Also thank you

I don't think breathable air counts as signs of industry. Although looks like JWST has found a planet with carbon dioxide which is interesting.

So you are right I guess that it could possibly detect industrial emissions.

Interestingly enough the planet with CO2 found is 700 light years away which could hint at industrial life there (but still going to be pretty hard to be certain), but if they were looking at us then they would only see Earth's atmosphere 700 years ago which would have a lot less CO2 then now.

But anyway in terms of electrical emissions, radio waves or seeing constructions on surface (or even orbital) I think it's pretty hard to get anything from the nearest solar system to ours, you can't just take a quick photo so everything is going to be super blurry

You're right, I meant to say breathable air and CO2/signs of an industrial society. I wonder how we would confirm an advanced civilization if we 100% detected these things.

I don't think it could be confirmed by atmosphere alone, no telling how an atmosphere is composed on an alien planet. Detecting something like CFCs would be a really strong sign but still not 100% if there is some wacky geological process or unknown reactions from alien elements.

Edit: that being said focusing on a planet with CFCs in atmosphere would still be really cool anyway

Just imagine thousands of civilisations are shouting at each other.

My brain hurts thinking about this. 🤯

Dude, you need to write a book. 😯