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Open Question

Could you tell me about the life cycle of galaxies?

In Astronomy & Space
  

    


These are all very good questions and I believe that a lot of astronomers are looking in to all of that at the minute. It used to be held that all the galaxies formed in a relatively short time period - the 'Epoch of Galaxy Formation' This idea has pretty much been disproved and nowadays it is more popular to think of galaxies as forming from mergers of smaller galaxies and so on. This means that formation is an ongoing process so it is not easy to assign ages to galaxies. We could assign an age to the Milky Way by the ages of its oldest constituents. Globular Clusters are 15 billion years old, which is getting close to the supposed age of the universe. The likely fate of the Milky Way is not to be swallowed up by the central Black Hole, but to merge with Andromeda (which is moving towards us) to form a much larger elliptical galaxy.
366 days ago
  

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