Milky way collision with nearby galaxy could wake up sleeping black hole in its centre

In roughly 2.4 billion years, our home galaxy, the **Milky Way** , will be in a cataclysmic collision with our satellite dwarf **galaxy** – a cloud of gas, dust and stars – in a dramatic end for one of the two. Over the course of history and astronomy, we’ve come to see stars, planets and entire galaxies at great distances from our own. Maybe that’s where the rest of us Earthling get out false sense of ‘permanence’ in the universe. Any astronomer worth his star-charts will tell you, though, that that is a joke. We’re now a few billion year away from seeing proof of how chaotic a universe our galaxy (and we) live in. Typically, galaxies like our Milky Way have dwarf, satellite galaxies that live a quiet life orbiting around their hosts for billions of years. Every now and again, they fall into the host’s center, colliding with it and being devoured by the bigger galaxy. [caption id=“attachment_5854341” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Hubble Space Telescope image representing a merger between two galaxies (M51a and M51b) similar in mass to the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Image credit: NASA/ESA[/caption] The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy currently 163,000 light-years away from our own. Until recently, astronomers thought that it would either orbit our Galaxy for many billions of years, or (since it moves so fast) escape from our Galaxy’s gravitational pull. The LMC is on a collision course with the Milky Way, according to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In about 2.4 billion years, astronomers think it will merge in a catastrophic event that will be powerful enough to wake up a dormant supermassive black hole in our own galaxy. In the new research, astronomers have predicted that the woken black hole will then devour the gas around it and grow in size. The halo of stars around the Milky Way will also see a lot of significant changes after the event – growing five times as big. The merger is also expected to eject the central disk of stars in the galaxy into the halo – gravitationally speaking, flinging it far from its original position in our massive spiral galaxy.

“While this will not affect our Solar System, there is a small chance that we might not escape unscathed from the collision between the two galaxies which could knock us out of the Milky Way and into interstellar space,” Professor Carlos Frenk, lead researcher from Durham University told university press. “Beautiful as it is, our Universe is constantly evolving, often through violent events like the forthcoming collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud.” If any version of mankind lives until then, and survives to tell the tale, the researchers think they would be treated to a cosmic fireworks display from the bright and energetic radiation spewing out of the black hole at our galaxy’s center.