Scientists have discovered over 550 rogue objects in Andromeda – the Milky Way’s neighboring galaxy, which could potentially displace Earth from its habitable zone in a future galactic collision.
Andromeda Galaxy – (Photo: NASA)
According to Space, researchers have identified 556 giant red branch stars in a region of Andromeda known as the Northeast Shelf, which does not entirely belong to the galaxy itself.
This entire Northeast Shelf is a stream of stars and material formed from a catastrophic galactic collision in the past.
“The remnants of each collision can be identified by studying the motion of the stars and their chemical composition. Together, this information acts as a kind of fingerprint that identifies the stars that have participated in a galaxy during a collision,” said Dr. Ivanna Escala from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, a member of the research team.
Located 2.5 million light-years from Earth, Andromeda is the closest large neighbor to the Milky Way, which contains Earth.
The fate of the aforementioned rogue red stars may reflect part of our own future, as scientists believe that in the next 2 billion years, Andromeda and the Milky Way will have a violent encounter, potentially resulting in Earth being ejected from the Sun’s “Goldilocks zone”.
Researchers hope that understanding these streams of material can shed light on how a galaxy acquires more matter, revealing its history, formation, composition, and surrounding characteristics.
The results were recently presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in California.
