There is a beginning and an end to everything. We regularly measure time in terms of how long our species tends to live, and over the relatively short span of time, stars, planets and galaxies may appear to be living ‘forever’. This is of course not true, but since these objects and structures exist so much longer than us, it’s hard to imagine how something like a galaxy could die. Luckily we have scientists, and those scientists have extremely powerful hardware that can show us what it looks like when these celestial objects reach the end of their lives, and the Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a beautiful image of a galaxy that really in the death throes.
NGC 1947 is a spiral galaxy – or at least earlier. In an image captured by Hubble, we see little more than faint gas exchanges around the inside of the galaxy, which is still full of millions of stars. The galaxy is old, and given its current state, it is unlikely to last much longer.
Galaxies are born of massive clouds of dust and gas. The material forms stars and planets and moons and everything that a galaxy will eventually contain. Over time, stars die. When the stars explode in supernovae, the material is released and can eventually form new stars, new planets, and so on.
It is a cycle that can repeat over and over again and keep an galaxy alive, but if the galaxy loses too much of its matter in space, it can struggle to form new stars and eventually fade to nothing. . NGC 1947 seems to be on its way, with little free material to form new stars and a core of stars that the cycle is unlikely to keep going any longer.
The European Space Agency explains:
This galaxy, which is about 40 million light-years from Earth, shows its structure by illuminating the remaining faint gas and dust disk with millions of stars. In this photo, taken with NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the dim remnants of the galaxy’s spiral arms can still be seen in the vast thin wires of dark gas that surround it. Without most of the star-forming material, it is unlikely that many new stars will be born within NGC 1947, which will cause this galaxy to fade over time.
If our own galaxy, the Milky Way, was not in collision with the Andromeda galaxy, this is the kind of fate that could befall it. Gradually loses its matter and energy with which new stars are produced and eventually fades into nothingness. Of course, we will all be over by the time one of these things happens, so this is not something any of us really need to worry about.
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See the original version of this article on BGR.com