What if we could focus on a telescope and see what our galaxy would look like in the distant future?

ESA scientists Went there. With Gia Early Data Release 3 (Gia EDR3), they created an animation that shows evolution The Milky Way For the next 1.6 million years, the final frame for our galaxy to show up in 400,000 years will be backtracks, but for a confusing image. It allows you to know the future paths of 40,000 stars about 326 light-years from the Sun. While this may not be the case for all the stars that exist within those boundaries, it does provide an accurate visualization of how they move as they accelerate, decrease, or move closer (compared to the Sun) to our Sun.

“From the knowledge of the position of a star in the sky today, and from the distances and movements measured by Gia, we can predict where the stars will appear in the sky in the future,” said Anthony Brown, an ESA astronomer who led the effort with a code. Here, Told SYFY WIRE.

What looks like cosmic spider webs are actually the paths of the stars. The motions of distant stars appear to be longer lines, not moving faster than long ones – but because of optical illusions they are modeled in this way. Although you know that something that really moves farther is moving slower and shorter farther, do you feel the speed and distance increase as you get closer? That’s it. If you look very closely, you may notice that some star paths that start to move faster are moving more slowly, or vice versa. It is possible to approach these stars The sun But then go further.

The simulation also assumes that they accelerate directly through space. In fact, when our stars, including our Sun, orbit the Milky Way, they constantly change direction. Orbiting objects always rotate.

It is frightening to look into the future up to 1.6 million years – but it is also important to note that the measurements here predict the Sun’s acceleration due to the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. This does not mean that it is just a prediction of where the sun will go. Acceleration of the barcentreThe center of mass of the universe, the animation really shows how it can be seen from a solar point of view in our galaxy, only the acceleration of the Milky Way. The animation represents the acceleration of the bar center of the solar system.

As the solar system orbits in the Milky Way, the bar center changes very slowly over time and experiences the effects of various mass centers, such as spiral weapons, large molecular clouds, or the largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Great Magellanic Cloud Dai), ”Brown said. Within the time frame of the animation, the change in acceleration is not noticeable. ”

This animation is made possible Upgrade to Gaia EDR3 From Gia DR2. The EDR3 data gave the Browns’ team the advantage of being able to measure the movements of stars more accurately, because this time the space telescope has processed more observations, with more time elapsed between the first and last observations. The animation above is basically the equivalent of pressing the Galaxy Fast Forward button. If the stars were shown to be moving at their true rate, it would not only be painful to watch, but you would be sitting there and building a skeleton for 1.6 million years.

Watching the simulation feels like thousands of shooting stars are flying across the Milky Way, but they seem to move to the right of the screen and leave a void on the left. Things look like that in relation to the movement of the sun, it seems that all those stars are moving in opposite directions. This is another optical illusion that if you are the Sun, as you move through the galaxy, you will see the stars in front of you move farther and farther, and those behind you will travel closer to your entire cluster.

As Gia sends more data to Earth, it will not only add to this simulation, but will also help Brown and other ESA scientists create more simulations on this vein.

“The more data we collect, the more accurate the distances and movements. We can build such simulations on large volumes, different stars and different time scales, ”he said. “We want to see more of what the solar system will look like in the long run.”