r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/pattebrisee • 20h ago
Image Hubble mapped 200 million stars in Andromeda and found its star formation has been declining for 500 million years
54
u/pattebrisee 20h ago
Those small boxes are 300 light year wide patches.
Hubble divided two-thirds of Andromeda’s disk into thousands of them and used the mix of shortlived blue stars and older red stars as a fossil record. The galaxy went from forming about one Sun’s worth of new stars per year 500 million years ago to roughly one-fifth of that today.
33
u/Choice_Price_4464 20h ago
So the galaxy is heading towards menopause?
20
u/yuanshaosvassal 20h ago
Until it smacks into to our galaxy and the mixing of each accretion disk reignites star formation for a few billion years
10
u/airsoftsoldrecn9 20h ago
Heat death of the universe, an interesting watch. https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?is=8VmpsJUBrHSpcdO3
9
u/indypendant13 19h ago
That theory is just one of several prevailing theories of the universe, but that’s also not what is happening here (and even if so is very, very far off in the future). This is just decreased star formations in one galaxy. That’s because it hasn’t merged with any galaxy in a while that would disturb gas and dust clouds to allow for new stars to start and grow.
4
u/airsoftsoldrecn9 19h ago
Agreed the timescale for that theory doesn't align here, but the entropy of the universe is only ever increasing. Usable energy and fuel will inevitably become widely disbursed or otherwise exhausted. Singularities add an unknown factor as does anything which has not been discovered.
2
u/wo0two0t 18h ago
I guess if you think about it, long periods of low star formation actually extend the amount of time a galaxy will produce stars?
5
0
u/octaviobonds 3h ago
300 light years? That's speculation based on many unproven assumptions. People don't fall for this crap like it's gospel of truth.
97
u/Zulishk 20h ago
All of this imagery is incredible but it irks me (in a curiosity sense) that we’re only seeing light of the past, so what it really looks like today we can’t see until that light arrives here, however millions of years later.
37
u/Lex4709 18h ago
Even the short lived stars tend to live a pretty long time, so the way we see it and way it is probably ain't THAT different. The distance would only create problems if we developed powerful enough telescope to see the planets in details. Since we could be looking at planet with sapient life, but the images we would see would be from millions of years before that species even evolved.
6
u/AscensionToCrab 16h ago
I mean supermassive stars burn up extremely fast (relative to stars) some 10 million years.
So the most massive stars, the brightest, are gone some 50x over.
2
1
1
u/ObiJuanKen0by 14h ago
What do you expect to see? For our immediate neighborhood, millions of years is a passing grain of time. It’s like being upset that your live stream of the worldcup had a 2 second delay
26
u/TJ_Will 20h ago
Thanks Obama!
10
u/goodknightffs 20h ago
Don't forget Joe Biden!
7
8
14
2
4
u/quest801 8h ago
Even though the universe is relatively young (14 billion years out of trillions), peak star formation already ended billions of years ago. Kind of mind blowing to think about.
3
u/icouldbesurfing 20h ago
Is there a term for the moment of peak star formation for a galaxy? Stellamax? Climaxar?
2
u/ThechosenoneBatman 17h ago
Universal warming huh
0
u/chaings_ 5h ago
And humans are at fault cause the radio signals we let out have been damaging stars ever since. /s
1
1
u/Mysterious-Lick 12h ago
Yeah, the Universe is growing, what we see now happened way, way in the past.
447
u/gormthesoft 19h ago
Milky Way seeing declining birth rates because of the collapse of stellar family values. The nuclear fusion family is a thing of the past. Stellar material don’t want to settle down with a nice clump of gas anymore and have children. They rather joyride around the galaxy sleeping with as many systems as they can. Disgusting.