"The star spins once every 1.2 seconds and the star it feasts on orbits it every 1.3 days."
So that's what the Andromeda Strain is.
Neutron stars have been found in our own galaxy for decades, but now scientists have spotted the first in our galactic neighbor Andromeda. A neutron star is the remnant of a once-bright star that has since gone supernova and spins rapidly. If an extremely dense remnant encounters another star it sucks off its material, …
Just the fact that they can tell that much about a stellar pair in another freakin' galaxy just leaves me dumb-founded.
Now if we just had some way off this rock that didn't take lifetimes to get anywhere near another star, let alone another galaxy.
"We'll be able to get a lot closer look in about four billion years' time, at which point the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our Milky Way and merge into a new super-galaxy."
Maybe by then HλLF-LIFE 3 will have been released?
But seriously, top-notch boffinry. All this data the astroboffins keep accumulating would be a better playground for data scientists to train their algos than my shopping metadata.
My first thought on reading this was that picking out any detail from something so far away must be almost impossible. How could anyone possibly tell whether signals from another galaxy were coming from the same source or not?
Then I saw the accompanying image.
Seven shades of awesome. Consider my gast well and truly flabbered!
"We'll be able to get a lot closer look in about four billion years' time, at which point the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our Milky Way and merge into a new super-galaxy."
Is this a coincidence?, as in approx 4 billions years time, our Sun will apparently swallow up Earth and then collapse and ruminate on what's it's consumed. Maybe merging with Andromeda will provide Sol with some dessert to feast on ;-)
That's a great idea as I'll doubtlessly be running the kids around to basketball games/tournaments and miss it otherwise. I wonder if we can schedule it as a mid-week event. I wouldn't mind them missing a practice for an astronomical event like this.