As darkness falls and the shades are drawn I sit here within the fading mild within the 100th anniversary of Irish author Bram Stoker’s demise.

A clap of thunder. Hail bursts from lowering thunder clouds.

A shadow flits across the window… is it an individual hurrying home to flee the foul weather conditions? Perhaps Stoker’s creation still stalks the landscape?

Just as the Dracula of Stoker’s novel required sustenance by feeding on the lifeblood of other people, so as well we have found a universe wherever strange creatures are nourished by make any difference that courses by means of the cosmos.

Black holes rip apart whatever that strays much too near to their clutches, galaxies like the Milky Way cannibalize scaled-down siblings, as well as the universe blazes with violence at substantial-power wavelengths.

On the smaller scale, a white dwarf star scavenges its orbiting companion, comets are flung from the heavens to fall like Thor’s hammer on an unsuspecting entire world, and gravitational forces cruelly warp and melt the interiors of moons.

In the event the sky clears as well as the globe is silent though, we can contemplate the stillness of the evening, knowing that living clings tenaciously to this blue marble despite the perils: Suddenly those celestial demons are tamed as we turn our gaze skyward and marvel.

What’s the furthest thing you may see using your naked eye? The Moon? The Sun? Saturn? Probably it’s a star; they are considerably farther aside after all. And so they’re all at different distances.

Not even shut.

While using bare eye, inside a dark sky, apart from neighborhood protection lights and also the neon-glow of urban skies, within the closing weeks in the season, overhead lies a dim patch which might just be seen…

The Andromeda Galaxy

Messier 31 (M31) since it’s recognized, is really a sister galaxy with the Milky Way, one of numerous but surely its closest. This is really a spiral galaxy significantly like our personal but twice the dimensions. Our eyes can only see the glow of your galaxy’s central bulge and, when photographed it spans and region 6 instances the width in the Moon.

At present The Andromeda Galaxy is about a couple of two million light years distant and due on the head-warping legal guidelines from the Universe, that implies the mild that enters your eyes whenever you take a look at it’s a couple of.2 million several years aged. You see it because it was earlier than Man walked the Planet.

One particular of your consequences of mild obtaining a finite speed limit (186,000 miles for every 2nd) is usually that you may never ever see anything because it actually is, only since it was. And the more away an object, the older the mild we see. So in some sense, the Universe acts being a time device! We can only previously appear to the past. We are able to even basically examine the existing.

There is another unsettling simple fact about M31 – it is really careening in the direction of our Milky Way at amongst 62 and 87 miles each 2nd (about 400 gentle several years each and every million a long time) and both galaxies are expected to collide in about 4.5 billion years.

Considering that there’s an ingredient of uncertainty in velocities and trajectories, it is really not identified for selected what will take place, but the expectation is the fact that the 2 galaxies will finally merge and style a substantial elliptical galaxy. Both equally will drop their aesthetic and gorgeous spiral structures like an end result.

How our photovoltaic process will fare can be unidentified, should the galaxies merge. If your galaxies don’t merge, then there is a small possibility the solar system could be ejected from your Milky Way, out in the dark void between The Andromeda Galaxy. On the other hand, there’s also an opportunity the solar method could do a cosmic swap and wind up from the Andromeda galaxy as opposed to the Milky Way.

No matter whether anybody is going to be all-around when that comes about could be very a lot open to query.

So once you search up at that faint fuzzy patch using a dark and moonless night time, think about you could see the ghostly light-weight of a galaxy, six instances more substantial than anything at all else from the evening sky, because it hurtles towards a cosmic kiss together with the Milky Way that could modify the lives of the two galaxies forever.