The Milky Way is on course to collide with Andromeda Galaxy
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Andromeda is the largest neighboring galaxy and it's
approaching the Milky Way, at 70 miles per second.
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When they meet in 4.5 billion years the merging is going
to be what Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls
an amazing, billion-year long light show.
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[video opens to new window]
This visualization of a galaxy collision shows the start-to-end sequence with comparisons of interacting galaxies observed by the Hubble telescope.
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There are 200 billion galaxies.
Galaxy collisions happen a lot.
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Katie Mack (cosmologist, author, and Twitter celebrity)
puts it like this
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In fact, galaxies primarily grow by cannibalizing other (smaller) galaxies. Our own has eaten several.
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When two galaxies of similar size collide, it can get really dramatic. Stars get flung around due to the complicated gravitational fields.
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In addition to making the galaxies look like a train wreck (this is the term we often use), the merging can also cause new stars to form. It can feed the big black holes too.
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For all that chaos, collisions between stars themselves are actually pretty unlikely. There's a LOT of space between stars, even in galaxies.
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Important notes on impending collision of Andromeda & Milky Way:
* It'll be pretty
* Sun will prob. survive
* Earth totally charred by then
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The Solar System will survive
😛
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Earth's surface will not
🥵
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The Solar System will stay intact with little disturbance to the orbits of the Sun and planets, during the galaxy collision.
However by that time, the Sun will double in sunlight,
and Earth will be completely scorched.
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Because to view it from Earth would be impossible without perishing from extreme heat, I put together this GIF (using NASA images) to show what the collision will look like:
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