End of the Milky Way: Galaxy is DYING as it is pushed and shoved around supercluster

The Milky Way galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster, which in turn is part of an even bigger cluster of galaxies known as the Virgo Supercluster. The Virgo

Supercluster is 110 million light-years across and contains roughly 110 billion times the number of stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars,

according to NASA. The numbers are almost incomprehensible, but what is certain is that it equates to a lot of gravity.

With all the gravity, there is a lot of push and shove in the supercluster, which is stripping the galaxies of their hydrogen.

Billions of years in the future, there will be no more hydrogen to create new stars, and the current crop of stars have a finite lifetime.

The lifetime of a star is relative to its mass – our Sun has enough mass to continue fusing hydrogen for about 10 billion years.

Nicholas Webb, from the University of London, wrote on Q+A site Quora: “Our galaxy isn’t alone. It is part of a small group of galaxies that are gradually coming together to form one

gigantic galaxy

“This is the Virgo Supercluster, a cloud of galaxies centred on the Virgo Cluster, a dense, well, cluster of galaxies a quadrillion times the mass of our Sun.

“The Cluster is 16.5 million parsecs away, and yet its gravity still pulls our local group toward it.

“Within the Virgo Cluster, its immense gravitational pull pushes galaxies to near-relativistic speeds, blasting away their free hydrogen, and leaving them bereft of new stars.

READ MORE: Black hole shock: Human body would be ‘turned to spaghetti’

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“Imagine, an entire galaxy, slowly dying, unable to renew, simply because of where it is.”

However, before all of this, the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda – the nearest galaxy to ours and one that is 220,000 light-years across, twice the size of the Milky Way – just

to really make sure life cannot survive.

Andromeda is approaching the Milky Way at around five million kilometres a year meaning that “in about three billion years, Andromeda will collide with ours, according to Geraint Lewis, an

Astrophysicist at the University of Sydney.

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Mr Lewis continued: “The collision will shake-up the Milky Way and it will be lit up like a Christmas Tree as new stars are created.

“The gas available in this collision gets used up very quickly. New stars will form and die. The gas will be swallowed up by a supermassive black hole.”

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