Galactic collision of Milky Way and Andromeda

Galactic collision of Milky Way and Andromeda | Daily Tribune

Astronomers predict that about 100 million years from now our galaxy, the Milky Way with about 800 billion stars, will have a massive head-on collision with a bigger neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, with about 1.2 trillion stars. Don’t worry because by then we would no longer exist.

A galactic collision does not mean the stars of both galaxies will collide. There will be no massive fireworks. There is plenty of space between the stars of both galaxies, so they will merely pass each other. But in the process of passing each other, millions of massive electromagnetic storms will trigger the birth of millions of new stars and the death of millions of old stars. It will be a slow “silent” collision that will take a few million Earth years to occur.

About a hundred billion years ago, there was a supernova, a massive explosion of all explosions whose light illuminated half of the Universe. Its remnants now form the Virgo supercluster of about a thousand galaxies, of which our home, the Milky Way, is but a tiny, microscopic dot.

We are so tiny, a mere micro-dot in the vast Known Universe with a staggering diameter of 93 billion light years. Our sun is but one of the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars found in trillions of galaxies, each galaxy having an average of about a trillion stars. Beyond the 93-billion light years of the so-called Known Universe nothing is known because light has not yet reached the Earth.

The galaxies that we can see through our modern telescopes are light from the distant past because it takes millions of years for their light to reach us. It is possible that the stars we see through our modern telescopes today no longer exist, if they had exploded into a nova after they emitted the light that is traveling towards Earth. Because of the time factor, the Universe we see is actually an illusion, a thing of the past that no longer exists.

Yet we, in our utter smallness, are “big” because we have consciousness. When we gaze at a star through a telescope a thousand light years away, we become part of that star through our consciousness and we become that star. We transcend the physical universe with our minds. Every new discovery we make with our puny instruments becomes a part of us. That is the power of perspective. Our consciousness thus sanctifies God’s creation.

The Big Bang Theory

In the “Big Bang” theory, all matter known in the entire Universe today was supposedly contained in a “ball” smaller than an atom. The energy, density and gravity within this “ball” were so massive they defied imagination, perhaps a number followed by 100 or more zeroes.

This tiny ball exploded within eight nano-seconds (a billionth of a second), ushering in the “birth” of the Universe as we know it today. That explosion is still in motion today, billions of stars and galaxies scattering and expanding away from ground zero. At least, that is one theory of the best expert astronomers today.

In theory, the Universe is made up 85 percent, more or less, of “voids” or dark areas with dark galaxies and invisible dark matter or energy — a topic for a separate article. Astronomers say that these cosmic voids are responsible for the slowing down of the Big Bang. Some voids are as large as a million galaxies. Yet, these dark matter or energy are still relatively a mystery to Man.

They say that, theoretically, this slowing down will eventually cause the Big Bang explosion to reach zero momentum and implode back to its original ground zero, just like a ball thrown up in the air, returning to Earth. Then we may have Big Bang No. 2. This cycle of explosions—implosions may repeat itself, unless there is an intervening “cosmic event” larger than the Big Bang.

These are mere evolving theories, subject to research, debates and new discoveries. It is possible that we cannot have an answer because the life span of man may be just a few “seconds” compared to the life span of the Universe of a “semi-eternity,” whatever that may mean.