Far out cosmology:MilkyWay in a big void (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 07, 2017, 15:04 (2515 days ago) @ David Turell

Comment: Our galaxy has life. We don't want lots of dangerous stuff exploding round us and we don't want to run into another galaxy for some time. This void is protective. Currently we are scheduled to run into Andromeda in about two billion years. That alone could be destructible enough to destroy life before our sun expands and finishes Earth life five billion years from now. The time term for life in this arrangement is finite. Will that be the end of it or is there another solution God will present?

Thank goodness. Look at this report about clusters of galaxies colliding:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/space-hots-up-when-galaxy-clusters-collide

Astronomers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have been watching two enormous galaxy clusters that are merging to create an even bigger cluster dubbed Abell 115, some 2.4 billion light years away.

In an unexpected outcome, the collision between the two clusters has produced a turbulent region of hot gas, with temperatures reaching 1.7 million degrees Celsius. That’s approximately three times hotter than either of the cluster cores.

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To estimate the temperature of Abell 115, Burns and his team developed software to create high contrast temperature maps of all the regions in the two colliding clusters, using the X-ray and radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The results were then fed through NASA’s Ames Research Centre supercomputer.
As well as the unexpected heat produced, the results also show that the newly forming super-cluster is sending radio emissions a long way out into deep space.

“These radio emissions are caused by electrons in the magnetic field of the galaxy cluster traveling at near the speed of light,” says Burns.

“Clearly something has energised the electrons, which we think is related to the cluster banging process.”

Each of the clusters contains hundreds of galaxies, many the size of the Milky Way. Their collision, says Burns, is one of the “biggest bangs in the universe since the Big Bang”.
The team predicts that eventually the turbulence created by the collision will abate and the new mega-cluster will reach some form of equilibrium.

“We believe Abell 115 will eventually ‘relax’ and become centrally condensed,” says Burns, “which is relatively boring compared to what we are seeing now.”

Comment: the universe is a dangerous place for life to exist. Thank goodness we are in a quiet spot. Purposefully?