Quote:
Originally Posted by Robh
Fascinating. With the Canis Major dwarf of a billion stars and assuming the Milky Way has 100 billion stars, I can see where the extra 1% mass comes from. However, the Milky Way could have up to 400 billion stars.
Assuming a collision of stars occurred, what is the outcome if two Sun-like stars collide? Supernova?
Regards, Rob.
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They won't collide....the stars are that far apart that the chances of them colliding are vanishingly small. The average star in our part of the galaxy is roughly 10 light years apart, and for the galaxy overall about 4 light years. Either distance is about 6-7 orders of magnitude larger than most stars and even 4-5 orders larger than the largest stars. You can see from this how unlikely a collision is.
Even on the off chance two stars did collide, they'd just eventually merge into a larger star. So long as the collision's dynamics were right.