The Andromeda galaxy is born from a collision recent

AFP

AFP

Monday, February 19, 2018 06:58

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Monday, February 19, 2018 07:01

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PARIS | The Andromeda galaxy was born out of a collision between two star clusters, there are less than three billion years ago, according to a study published by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

François Hammer, an astronomer of the Paris Observatory and his team of French-chinese, arrived at these conclusions by treating not less than one terabyte (1 000 000 000 000 bytes) of data, the equivalent of two million photographs of 500 kilo-bytes.

“Using the modeling performed on the most powerful computing resources available in France, the researchers were able to trace the trajectories of the two galaxies, discovering that they are crossed, there are 1.8 to 3 billion years.

This collision was born in Andromeda, a galaxy in the form of a disc flattened, at a time when the Earth already existed.

The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years (a light year is 9.460 billion km). It represents the heavenly object most distant visible to the naked eye.

Previous research had highlighted a major difference between Andromeda and the milky Way.

“In the giant disk of the Andromeda all stars older than 2 billion years undergo disorderly movements “, said the release. “In comparison, the stars in the disk of the milky Way galaxy, including our Sun, are subject only to a simple rotation movement “.

According to the team of researchers, “only a collision recent” may explain the agitation of the stars of Andromeda.

Other studies estimate that a collision will mark the history of the Andromeda galaxy with our galaxy, the milky Way. But this should only happen in four billion years.