Future of Our Galaxy Galactic Millenium :: Essays Papers

Future of Our Galaxy Galactic Millenium What Does the Future Hold? (adopted from an article by Greg Laughlin and Fred Adams, "Celebrating the Galactic Millennium", Astronomy November 2001) Not too long ago, we were looking forward to the New Millennium. To many of us, this was an important event of our lives. On a larger scale, however, the New Millennium looks insignificant. "If we adopt an astronomical perspective, however, a much larger and more distant celebration remains on the schedule-the Galactic Millennium," write Greg Laughlin and Fred Adam in their article Celebrating the Galactic Millennium. Laughlin and Adam speculate about the proposed changes to the Universe in the future and the coming of the Galactic Millennium. Present Day Galaxy According to the authors, the present day galaxy is relentlessly empty and spans a tremendous scope. In a scale model of the galaxy where stars are the size of sand grains, the nearest stellar system (Alpha and Proxima Centauris) is six miles away. Our Galaxy contains approximately 100 Billion stars. In this model, the stars move through their orbits at a pace of only a few feet per terrestrial year. The sun takes nearly 100 million terrestrial years to make a full circuit of the galaxy. The last time the sun passed through our current galactic longitude was in the middle of the Cretaceous period, when the giant continent Gondwanaland was beginning to break up into African and South America and the giant Carnotaurus enjoyed its place at the top of the food chain (before the reign of T.Rex). What Does the Future Hold? The authors' prospected views on the future of our galaxy are rather harsh. The authors argue that a billion terrestrial years from now-in 10 galactic years-the galaxy will look much like it does now. Certain details, however, will be different. As the sun executes its next ten circuits around our galaxy's central hub, our today-familiar constellations will be scrambled one hundred times over. Many of the night stars in the sky will no longer exist. Deneb and Rigel, for example, will explode as supernovae. Sirious will swell into a red giant and puff out a planetary nebula. Alpha Centauri, currently the sun's closest neighbor, will recede from the sun, and its apparent brightness will fade below the threshold of naked-eye visibility. As the next billion years unfold, Earth will face pressing problems because of sun's activity.