No highway goes there
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
I once wrote my daughter a postcard about a black hole flying across space, seemingly detached from any galaxy. The other thing unusual about this black hole was that it seemed to be pulling along a star. There was a streamer of star matter being pulled out of the star into the black hole. So here we have this mental image of an orphaned black hole that at least has the foresight to bring along its own food supply.
So it appears that our galaxy is on the move and is going to crash into (loosely speaking, of course) the Andromeda galaxy:
May 11, 2007 When Milky Way and Andromeda Collide, Earth Could Find Itself Far From Home Galactic "Brangelina" combo could knock our solar system out of the Milky Way By JR Minkel
If Homo sapiens can stick it out on Earth for another two billion years, our descendants may witness quite a show in the night sky. Researchers estimate that the Milky Way will collide with its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, at around that time—well before the sun collapses into a white dwarf, perhaps destroying the Earth in the process.