2025-06-09
8 分钟Happy Monday, listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some science news you may have missed.
You've probably heard that our galaxy, the Milky Way,
is doomed to collide with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy sometime around 5 billion years from now.
But according to new research,
maybe we shouldn't count on this multi-galactic merger deal going through.
In a study published last Monday in Nature Astronomy,
researchers who analyzed data from the European Space Agency's Gaia Space Telescope and NASA's Hubble say the event is more of a coin flip than a given.
The team's 100,000 computer simulation suggests that there's just about a 50-50 chance of the two galaxies colliding within the next 10 billion years or so.
When you look at the next 4-5 billion years, that chance drops down to around 2%.
In other space news,
scientists are buzzing about a tiny star that punches way above its weight.
TOI-6894 is a red dwarf that's roughly 20% as massive as our sun.
But in a study published last Wednesday in Nature Astronomy,
researchers say they've spotted the signature of a giant planet orbiting this little guy.
The planet, called TOI-6894 b, is described as a low-density gas giant.
It's a little bigger than Saturn, but only has around half as much mass.
the presence of a gas giant around such a small star is so surprising that it challenges the most widely accepted theory of planet formation.
That theory, called core accretion,
suggests that giant planets are born when their solid cores get massive enough to start pulling in lots of gas.