NASA astronomers can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, Sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
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A giant cloud of hydrogen gas, discovered in 1963, is moving at more than 150 miles per second per second and is about to collide with the Milky Way, leading to a huge process of star formation. But this doesn’t have anything to do with that dreaded Mayan prophecy: The cloud will collide with the Milky Way in less than 40 million years, condensing into tens of thousands of bright, massive stars that will explode as supernovas within a couple of million years.
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Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of tiny, young galaxies that are brimming with star formation. Most of these galaxies are a hundred times less massive than the Milky Way, yet they churned out stars at a furious pace. However, it’s a mystery why these newly found dwarf galaxies were making batches of stars at such a high rate.
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There’s a black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and we now have evidence that it "acted up" during the 200 years of the Renaissance, around 1450-1650, sending out a massive blast of X-rays. How do we know? We’ve discovered evidence of extensive X-ray anomalies here on Earth. Could these emissions somehow account for the massive growth in art and intellect during that period of time?
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