Some will get flung out of Milkdromeda, some will be hurled down into the black hole.Īnd others will be safe, assuming they can avoid this fate over the Googol years it'll take for the supermassive black hole to finally evaporate. Well, fine, with my eternal robot body, it might still be my problem.Īfter our neighborhood is completely out of galaxies to consume, then there will just be countless eons of time for stars to interact for orbit after orbit. Of course, the Sun will die in about 5 billion years, so this future won't be our problem. Over the coming billions, trillions and quadrillions of years, more and more galaxies will collide with Milkdromeda, bringing new supermassive black holes and more stars to the chaos. The quasar SDSS J1106+1939 has the most energetic outflows ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date. Andromeda's black hole could be 100 million times the mass of the Sun, so it's a bigger target for stars with a death wish. Stars that would have been safe will careen past other stars and be deflected down into the maw of either of the two supermassive black holes on hand. Suddenly, you'll have two whole clouds of stars interacting in all kinds of ways, like an unstable blended family. The first panic will happen when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in about 4 billion years – let's call this mess Milkdromeda. Especially from out here in the galactic suburbs.īut there are a few situations that might cause some problems over vast periods of time. Over the short term, that supermassive black hole is totally harmless. A star that would have been orbiting happily for billions of years might get deflected into a collision course with the black hole. The problem happens when these stars interact with one another through their own gravity, and mess with each other's orbits. If a star gets close, without hitting, it'll get torn apart, but still, it doesn't happen very often. To get within the event horizon, which is only about 17 times bigger than the Sun. In order for a black hole to actually consume a star, it needs to make a direct hit. It's not pulling material in like a vacuum cleaner, it serves as a gravitational anchor for a group of stars to orbit around, for billions of years. Same goes with the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I mean, we'd all freeze because there wasn't a Sun in the sky anymore, but the Earth would continue to orbit this black hole in exactly the same orbit, for billions of years. To give you an example, you could replace the Sun with a black hole with the exact same mass, and nothing would change.
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.WeissĪ black hole is just a concentration of mass in a very small region, which things orbit around. Giving off more energy than the rest of their own galaxy combined.Īn illustration of Saggitarius A*. With the discovery of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, astronomers found evidence that there are black holes at the heart of every galaxy.Īt the same time, the discovery of supermassive black holes helped answer one of the big questions in astronomy: what are quasars? We did a whole article on them, but they're intensely bright objects, generating enough light they can be seen billions of light-years away. The only objects with that much density and gravity are black holes, but in this case, a black hole with millions of times the mass of our own Sun: a supermassive black hole. Imagine the mass of our Sun, and the tremendous power it would take to wrench a star like that around. In 2002, astronomers observed that there were stars zipping past this object, like comets on elliptical paths going around the Sun. It's one of those insights that simultaneously answered some questions, and opened up even more.īack in the 1970s, the astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown realized that there was an intense source of radio emissions coming from the very center of the Milky Way, in the constellation Sagittarius. The discovery of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, and really almost all galaxies, is one of my favorite discoveries in the field of astronomy. Is the supermassive black hole going to consume the Milky Way? If not, why not? If so, why so? Right?ĭon't worry, you have absolutely nothing to worry about, unless you plan to live for quadrillions of years, which I do, thanks to my future robot body.
Wait, that doesn't sound cool, that sort of sounds a little scary. And as we speak, it's in the process of tearing apart entire stars and star systems, occasionally consuming them, adding to its mass like a voracious shark.
It's right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation.
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