Sagittarius, Your Days are Numbered

The Milky Way is gobbling up the stars in the grouping we call Sagittarius. We see the stars the way they looked millions of years ago, but sometime in the future, Sagittarians will no longer have a star symbol to call their own.
David Whitehouse writes in BBC News Online that astronomers have learned that our Milky Way is devouring the nearby Sagittarius galaxy, which is 10,000 times smaller in than our own. "It's clear who's the bully in the interaction," says astronomer Steven Majewski "If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky."

This cosmic violence is hard to see because stars, gas and dust get in the way. To get a better view, astronomers used computers to digitally remove millions of stars that obscured the action. "We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalogue of half a billion," says astronomer Michael Skrutskie. "By tuning our maps of the sky to the right kind of star, the Sagittarius system jumped into view."

Astronomer Martin Weinberg says, "After slow, continuous gnawing by the Milky Way, Sagittarius has been whittled down to the point that it cannot hold itself together much longer. We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system."


news.bbc.co.uk...

Oh dear. I hope "Starsign horoscopes" are bull# then, because otherwise I figure that having my starsign gobbled up would cause a problem, lol

Ah so thats your star sign then!!!

Good luck!!!

well i am an aries so im safe....
can you imagine in the mag star sign collum
1 missing....one less friends to have to read!!
lol

How long will it take for this to happen thousands of years??????

Is Saggitarius that small?
I thought that the milky way was an 'average' sized galaxy?

If it is 10000 times bigger than saggitarius makes me wonder that it was a galaxy at all.

just goes to show you that no matter what we do the universe has its own plans and you can't do much about it.

Originally posted by chebob
...I figure that having my starsign gobbled up would cause a problem, lol

I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you...After all, you'll already be dead a looooong time before Sagitarius dies.

I'M A SAGGITARIUS! IS THIS WHY I KEEP GET EERRR ON THE ANSWER BOARD AFTER ALL THESE DECADES! IS THIS WHY I'M SO #IN PISSED OFF!

KJNDA FUNNY THAT I SEE THIS POST WHEN I CAN'T ANY MORE PISSED OFF!

Well...I'm an Aquaruis...so...I'm safe !

But that artical is interesting. But if that happend...wouldn't that just leave 11 month callender?

Probably have to invent a new star dign to replace the old one, lol, can't have all of those magazines having one less prodiction!

What should we call the new star sign?

The square horsy sign! After the upside down box horse constellation Pegasus. Don't know how those old zombie guys ever figured that out to look like a horse, must of been smoking a little to much khat...

Saggitarius the galaxy is different to Saggitarius the starsign.

There will still be saggitarians in the zodiac even after this galaxy breaks up.

Originally posted by mulberryblueshimmer
Saggitarius the galaxy is different to Saggitarius the starsign.

There will still be saggitarians in the zodiac even after this galaxy breaks up.

There would be, yes. One must also remember that when looking up at the night sky, we don't see the water-bearer, the ram, the lion, the centaur/archer, etc. but we see stars. The signs are human nature projected and programmed onto them. (Much like with a silicon chip.) So, the programming of Sagittarius would still be there, even if the constellation wasn't. (E.g. even if it lagged a sign.)