Our Galaxy Is a Cannibal

Sometimes galaxies eat each other! It's actually pretty common. And it turns out that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is pretty hungry.

Annotation:

Thumbnail Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)
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[LazerLord]

I just thought: How boring would it be to be on a planet on a star that isn't in a galaxy or star group. I mean, depending on how far away you are from any nearby galaxy, the night sky could look completely black, maybe with a few smudges of distant galaxies.

Then again, you could be close enough to another galaxy that you could get a great view!

[DanielRenardAnimation]

I learned most of this when I was like... 4 or 5 years old, when I observed bubbles on the surface of my bath water being attracted to each other, eventually colliding and often merging into bigger bubbles, over and over. Science experiments at its simplest!

[SauloGoki]

Reid is so much more comfortable with the camera now than when he started.
Way to go, Reid!

[nimrodyahal]

canis MAJOR DWARF galaxy.
"I am a very tall midget"

[Censtudios]

Always happy when scishow space uploads a new video. Especially when I'm bored, trying to find something interesting on youtube, then refresh the subscriptions page and see SciShow Space uploaded a video 8 minutes ago!!!!

[Hal_T]

I don't understand: why would a galaxy be expected to have stars of the same age? Regions of space that were rich in gas would form more massive stars. Regions of space that were gas-poor would form smaller stars. The more massive a star, the shorter its life (right?). The massive star dies and flings its gas out which then coalesces into new (young) stars, some large, some small, with corresponding lifetimes. After a while the ages are all mixed up into a variety of young and old stars. Why is a new theory needed? What did I miss?

[iprobablyforgotsomething]

You see, when two galaxies love each other very much, they'll come together to form a baby galaxy.

[laurenboggs]

Every time I watch this I have a massive increase in my eschatological anxiety

[jordib.]

Gratz on 500k subs. Keep it going, space ftw.

[baddiebakababe]

Just to clear something up, to my understanding the Andromeda galaxy will merge with the Milky Way, not consume it. It will then become the unoriginal name, "Milkdromeda". In fact, if the human race is still around during that time period, we will be mostly unaffected by the merger simply because the distances between systems are so great. I only say this because you point out the difference between galactic cannibalism and a general merge.

[rigrentals]

THanks SciShow,
Another amazing video about space. That stuff is profound. Keep up the great Videos.

[theldraspneumonoultramicro]

imagine to be imortal and able to travel in space and time allowing you to to choose moments in space and time so you could litteraly observe all this happen in a timelapse kinda way, how awesome would that not be? you could observe what existed before our current universe was formed, how the universe came to, how it ends and what comes after, will it all be consumed in "The Big Crunch" and reborn in a new big bang or will it all just slowly fade away into nothing in "The Big Freeze"

think if you could freely adjust your perspective of the light spectrum allowing you to see everything there is, whatever it be infrared or ultraviolet and so on.

the experience would be outside anything any human could ever possibly even begin to comprehend.

[Zechla]

Imagine if Galaxies were actually extremely slow living creatures, we're its bacteria and the black hole is its heart/brain

[vipermagi]

There are numerous reasons they could have re-uploaded the video. I would personally rank the highest reason they would re-upload a video on this channel as to correct a factual error that would not have looked acceptable by their standards with a simple notation, and sadly (though for legitimate reasons) YouTube doesn't allow you to upload edits to a video and maintain the same URL.

Mind you, this is just simply what I would consider the most likely of numerous reasons why they might have done this and ultimately I support them regardless of the specifics in this case.

[mattshnoop]

It's still hard to comprehend calling a Galaxy an object that has its own gravity, because it's made up of tiny stars... At what point does a group of objects become something with its own gravity, and not just a group?

[mikegoss]

I used to be a fan of the Milky Way...But now? finding out that we are the town bully...beating up on our pipsqueek neighbors and eating them...I mean, what are we? The Jeffrey Dahmer of the universe?

[PeterDrake]

Strange thought. What if the universe has a finite amount of gravity, and the more clustered the matter becomes the more space expands to compensate for it to keep the total gravity constant?

[bredmond]

I don't understand how the different ages could indicate galaxy cannibalism.  I thought that there could be new stellar nurseries in an galaxy that form new stars while older stars in other parts of the galaxy will continue on.  Can somebody clarify?

[HAPPYplaceQC]

Love these space educational videos! Thank you for sharing! 😊

[AngryKittens]

When a boy galaxy and a girl galaxy love each other very much...