NASA Captures What Will Happen to Earth 2 Billion Years From Now

(NLDO) - NASA has just released a spectacular photo of the "Penguin and Egg dance", which is actually an extremely fierce phenomenon of the universe.

The photo was released on the occasion of the 2nd anniversary of the first photos taken by the world's most powerful space telescope, James Webb, a deep space "warrior" developed and operated by NASA.

"Penguin" is another name for galaxy NGC 2936, while "Egg" is galaxy NGC 2937. The two galaxies appear to be dancing in the sky, but they are actually swallowing each other.

The photo of the Penguin and Egg dance was released by NASA, in which the Penguin is the entire bright penguin-shaped area, and the Egg is the compact galaxy to its left - Photo: NASA

NGC 2936 was originally a large spiral galaxy, the same type as Earth's Milky Way. But today, it has completely transformed into a literal penguin.

The center of the galaxy now looks like a glowing eye, while one star band is curled into a sharp beak, and other parts become structures resembling a head, spine, and flared tail.

Like all spiral galaxies, the Penguin is rich in gas and dust.

The gravitational interactions from the merger with the Egg impacted the thinner regions of gas and dust, causing them to collide into waves and form new stars in droves.

The star incubators are then what looks like a fish in the “beak” and “feathers” in the “tail”, surrounded by a smoke-like material consisting of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules.

In contrast, the compact shape of the Egg remains largely unchanged.

As an elliptical galaxy, it is filled with old stars, and has less gas and dust to be pulled away and form new stars.

Although very small compared to the Penguin, the Egg has a similar mass, so becomes a more compact and slower to deform mass.

Their ongoing interaction began 25 to 75 million years ago. They will continue to sway, entwine, and revolve around each other before finally breaking apart and merging into a single galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.

The two galaxies are currently 100,000 light years apart, which is a very short distance between galaxies.

For comparison, the Milky Way is 2.5 million light years away from its neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are also on track to merge, expected to happen within the next 4-5 billion years.

But before that, the Milky Way will merge with a more compact galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of its satellite galaxies, in about 2 billion years.

So the image NASA just released could be a preview for us to visualize how Earth's "home" will change in the next 2 billion and 4 billion years.

Our planet, along with the rest of the solar system, may drift into a strange new shape, rather than settling on the circular edge of the spiral disk of light.

The closer collision - with the Large Magellanic Cloud - is not expected to have a very strong impact on the solar system, meaning it will not be destructive. But some studies suggest it will be enough to knock Earth out of the "habitable zone".

Source: https://nld.com.vn/nasa-chup-duoc-dieu-se-xay-ra-voi-trai-dat-2-ti-nam-toi-196240714080002399.htm