Last Updated: 24th July, 2022

As far back as Earth’s history goes, man has dependably been interested in the stars. Going from the simple begin graphs of the antiquated Greeks to the rich index we have today, the investigation of the space that encompasses the Earth beyond any doubt has made significant progress.

In such manner, Astronomers have anticipated for a very long time that the Milky Way’s nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, was one day going to crash into us. Be that as it may, there is some uplifting news.

The European Space Agency (ESA) on 7th February shared that the Andromeda Galaxy, which was recently thought to slam into the Milky Way in about 3.9 billion years, will presently do as such in about 4.5 billion years.

The new gauge comes courtesy of Gaia, another astrometry venture. The job of Gaia is to follow and secure information focuses on begins in the Milky Way, Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.

In its 5-year mission range, Gaia will almost certainly make a total index of the 70 billion+ stars. By following the development of the stars across the sky, the information created by the Gaia project should enable astronomers to manufacture a more durable map of ours, yet in addition our neighboring galaxies. A definitive objective of the mission is to fabricate the most complete 3D guide of the stars in the nearby universe.

In an announcement, the ESA clarified “Past investigations of the Local Group have consolidated perceptions from telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Very Long Baseline Array to make sense of how the orbits of Andromeda and Triangulum have changed after some time. The two disk-shaped spiral galaxies are situated somewhere in the range of 2.5 and 3 million light-years from us and are close enough to each other that they might communicate.”

“Two potential outcomes rose: either Triangulum is on an extremely long six-billion-year circle around Andromeda yet has officially fallen into it previously, or it is as of now on its absolute first infall. Every situation mirrors an alternate orbital way, and in this manner an different formation history and future for every galaxy.” Gaia will most likely give the applicable information, which will enable astronomers to decode how the galaxies travel through space, yet additionally how every one of them rotates around its own spin axis.

Spotlights:

• Milky Way and Andromeda to collide in 4.5 billion years, not 3.9.
• Gaia telescope had the largest focal plane CCDs ever launched into space.
• Findings come from the second data dump from the Gaia mission. More dumps are expected.

The discoveries originate from the second information dump from the Gaia mission. Other than putting an increasingly precise course of events on the approaching crash the Gaia mission additionally uncovered the presence of stars flying among the galaxies and the presence of a huge ghost galaxy just on the edges of the Milky Way.

The Gaia mission was propelled in 2013 and is really not one, yet two telescopes. It utilizes three curved and three level mirrors to center and overlap light over an all out zone of 35 meters before it hits the detectors on-board. Gaia’s Charged Coupled Devices or CCDs offers a billion pixels for recording information, with every pixel having a pitch of 10 μm.

The essential focal plane of Gaia has 106 CCDs organized in 7 rows and 17 columns, with each offering a resolution of 4500×1996. Information from the Gaia mission is relied upon to be examined and published well into the 2020s.