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teamonkeylast Wednesday at 10:24 AM6 repliesview on HN

As others have mentioned, the space between stars is vast, but also it's actually very hard for stars to directly collide.

The reason for this is because the dynamical systems of gravity, conservation of momentum etc. tend to pull approaching stars into orbits around each other or make them slingshot away after a close approach, rather than collide directly. Even though intuitively you feel gravitational attraction would make it so that they pull together, the mechanics tend to prevent that from happening. It's the same reason that, unintuitively, it takes a lot of energy to bring a rocket from a stable orbit down to Earth.

That's not to say that direct collisions won't happen, the circumstances will surely be there for them to happen, with all those millions of stars, just less likely than you'd think.

When two stars collide it's usually because two stars are in close orbit and something causes an orbital decay, such as one leaching matter from another, or another star passing close enough to disrupt it. This last point is probably more of a catastrophic risk here; even more so the possibility of a passing star slingshotting planets away into open space.

Source: this was part of my undergrad thesis.


Replies

exe34last Wednesday at 10:27 AM

I think direct collision depends just on the geometric cross-section, no? Gravity can't repulse, so if you're on a direct collision path, nothing will move you off it. The whole slingshot thing is that you get close, you change path, but just because you pass close doesn't mean gravity will make you collide. I might be missing something...

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m4rtinklast Wednesday at 2:35 PM

Still close enough passes could disrupt orbits of all the stuff orbiting the stars far out in the Oort Cloud (basically leftovers from star formation) and result in comet bombardment of the inner system/free mas delivery for mega projects.

simondotaulast Wednesday at 10:55 AM

Related to the OP’s hypothetical, if we did cross paths with Andromeda, for how long would that intersection last? Or to put it another way, how long could Earth be within both galaxies, assuming a hypothetical perfect aim?

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nandomrumberlast Wednesday at 11:22 AM

Sort of random question: is there some estimate of the kinetic energy in the rotating mass of an entire galaxy.

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xhkkffbflast Wednesday at 8:49 PM

What? I was led to believe there would be collisions. I feel ripped off.