Tiny chance of that. When, and if, the the Milky Way collides with Andromeda, the chances are still astronomical that any stars actually collide at first. Shit might get really weird as the SMBHs start to come together and the centers of each galaxy eventually begin to merge, though.

That example was about how far things are from each other in our galaxy. The biggest problem is how much gravity is in play and how fast objects in the universe travel. An object like a planet and a blackhole only have a very narrow space to actually collide or have the planet get locked in orbit or a death spiral around a black hole. It's more likely a planet would get accelerated and spun out on a very different trajectory when they get close together.

So, your hope of us colliding with a blackhole is very unlikely. It's probably more likely we would get shifted into a different orbit around the sun or get kicked out of the solar system completely. If you were just wishing for hell and chaos, you would still get your wish in that regard.

Still, if we could survive the extremely deadly area around a blackhole, it would be kinda neat to fall into one. In theory, time and space is so wonky, we should be able to catch a glimpse of the end of the universe before we get crushed into an infinite point. Neat.

[–] Karjalan 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I think the concept of stars literally hitting each other is rather moot. As you've said, the chances are incredibly tiny... However, a star doesn't have to literally collide with the sun to cause unfathomable damage and destuction.

A star coming closer than the ort cloud will mess up gravitational interactions, orbits, and rain down rocks/ice from the ort cloud.

I don't know how much of that is factored into the "they won't collide so don't worry" formula/logic though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

I think the concept of stars literally hitting each other is rather moot

In many ways, I agree with you. I was simply trying to paint a picture of how much space is in between stars. Visualizing the scale and distances of the universe can be extremely difficult, so I opened with that to help explain why the chances of collision or significant interaction were low. However, given amount of time involved, a significant interaction has probably happened before and may happen again. (Visualizing space and time is hard for me, actually.) With that, I should cap my improbability to "within the time that humanity has ever existed, or will ever exist".

However, you did get me thinking about disruption on a much larger scale, far beyond the oort cloud. Could a cluster of black holes disrupt our orbit around the galaxy center significantly? Locally, even something of considerable size passing through our solar system can disrupt our own solar orbit, but may only measurable after thousands of years.

We are in a relatively quiet spot in our galaxy now from my own understanding, but if something was able to bump us (and hundreds of thousands of other stars) just a hair, it might have dire consequences in a few million years. (I wouldn't imagine that we would notice getting kicked out of our own galaxy completely though. Dunno.)

load more comments (6 replies)