[peterv]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrIk6dKcdoU&feature=related

[redsniper]

What if we're one of those stars that gets flung off into the void? D:

[iamzack]

we are not a star, dummy

[SpardaSon21]

What if Sol is one of the stars that gets flung into the void?

[General Battuta]

we are not a star, dummy

speak for yourself, girl named after rocks, I'M a star

[StarSlayer]

IRC isn't everything made up of star material anyway...

[Klaustrophobia]

What if we're one of those stars that gets flung off into the void? D:

well the sun will be long dead by the time this happens, but if it weren't, nothing would really change except the night sky is darker.  (assuming solar system orbits stay intact, i'm not sure about that)

[General Battuta]

What if we're one of those stars that gets flung off into the void? D:

well the sun will be long dead by the time this happens, but if it weren't, nothing would really change except the night sky is darker.  (assuming solar system orbits stay intact, i'm not sure about that)

No it won't. The collision is due in 3-5 billion years, which is inside the sun's projected lifespan.

[Bobboau]

more like at the end

[redsniper]

Oh, derp. Thought it was sooner.

[Astronomiya]

Our descendants, if they are still around, will have long since left Sol behind.  As the Sun ages, it gets hotter and brighter (it is about 30% brighter now than it was at its birth); Earth maintains its human-friendly temperatures by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in rocks and the oceans.  However, eventually all the carbon will be gone from the atmosphere, and this feedback loop will shut down, causing temperatures to permanently rise.  A little while after this happens, the oceans will boil away and no life will be left.  This will all happen anywhere from 100 million to 1 billion years from now, but it will happen.  Besides, every second on that video is one million years; humanity would have plenty of time to leave Sol if for some reason we are still there.

[iamzack]

We'd still probably be somewhere in the galaxy, though, whether using another star or aimlessly floating around.

[Shivan Hunter]

gefs

[Colonol Dekker]

Even the "Eye of Araan" won't save us

[peterv]

No, no no! Even the "Eye of Araan" won't save the Shivans and the Cylons from us 

[redsniper]

Now that's the spirit! Fight the powah!

[watsisname]

More simulations of galaxy mergers like this
Future Sky in particular is really cool.  Shows what the merger might look like from the sun's perspective.

I'd be more worried (not really since I won't be around) if our sun were flung into the central regions of the galaxy...
And if our descendants' star system does get spewed off into intergalactic space, then no big deal.  Would be an awesome view from out there amirite?

From what I have seen/read on the Milky Way / M31 merger, the most likely result is that our sun gets tossed back and forth through the central region of our galaxy several times.  But it really depends on where the sun is in its orbit and how exactly the galaxies merge.  As it stands now, we're not even 100% sure if the merger will happen because we have no idea what the "sideways" velocity of M31 is.  It might plow right through the center of the Milky Way, or it might miss us entirely... we just don't know yet.

[Klaustrophobia]

i seriously doubt a simulation that could predict what will happen to our sun to a degree of accuracy that could be considered more than a wild guess will be possible for MANY years to come.

[SypheDMar]

Well, unless our understanding of physics is totally wrong, I have no reason to question our understanding of physics.

[watsisname]

i seriously doubt a simulation that could predict what will happen to our sun to a degree of accuracy that could be considered more than a wild guess will be possible for MANY years to come.

That's correct, so what we do instead is we deal with probabilities.  We can run several simulations with various encounter geometries, and examine the distribution of resulting orbits for stars that started out in sun-like orbits (ie, lie at the sun's current distance from the galactic center).

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.1170v2.pdf

From section 4.3.2:  Given the uncertainties in our model parameters and
the fact that the orbital period of the Sun around the Milky
Way is much shorter than the merger timescale, it is not
possible to forecast reliably the actual phase of the Galactic
orbit of the Sun at the time of closest approach to Andromeda.
Therefore we regard all the stellar particles at the
galactocentric radius of the Sun as equally probable of representing
the Sun. We will first outline some of the general
features of our fiducial model, before showing similar distributions
from a subset of models to assess the reliability of
these results.

From Conclusion: ...there is a chance that the Sun will be ejected along with
other tidal material into a long tidal tail following the first
passage of Andromeda. Second, as a result of the disruptive
effects of each close tidal passage, there is an increasing
chance that the Sun will inhabit extended tidal features as
the interaction proceeds. Moreover, there is a small chance
that the Sun will be more tightly bound to Andromeda at
some point during the merger. In such a case, Andromeda
will capture the Sun and future astronomers in the solar system
might see the Milky Way as an external galaxy in the
night sky.