'Demise of our galaxy...': Is Andromeda-Milky Way collision inevitable?
Andromeda-Milky Way
Milky Way is gearing up for a massive change. Astronomers have spotted the Andromeda galaxy moving towards us and say that in approximately 4.5 billion a massive collision between the two galaxies will result in them merging. This will lead to several changes in the cosmic region and our solar system will be thrown into a new region in terms of galactic core. This cosmic event has been termed inevitable in previous research.
However, a new study says that there is a 50 per cent that the collision will not happen. The study, titled “Apocalypse When?” is available on the preprint server arXiv and delves into whether a galactic collision is certain to happen. The paper is currently undergoing peer review.
The study on Andromeda
Till Sawala, an astrophysicist at the University of Helsinki and co-author of the paper, studied data from the Gaia and Hubble telescopes to analyse Andromeda (the largest), the Milky Way, Triangulum, and the Large Magellanic Cloud - the largest galaxies in the Local Group. Predicting the galaxies’ evolution over the next 10 billion years, they found that Andromeda and Milky Way were merging in slightly less than half of the scenarios.
Also Read:Super-hungry black hole with an eerie glow is eating everything
“As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our Galaxy appear greatly exaggerated,” the researchers wrote in the study.
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When will Andromera collide with Milky Way?
Andromeda galaxy is located 2.5 million light-years away and scientists have been studying it for over a century. It is moving towards the Milky Way at great speed and a collision has been deemed as a surety. NASA says the "universe is expanding and accelerating, and collisions between galaxies in close proximity to each other still happen". This is "because they are bound by the gravity of the dark matter surrounding them."
Our neighbouring galaxy is travelling at great speed. In 2021, NASA’s Hubble telescope clicked a bunch of stars in Andromeda, and upon analysis, the timeline for the collision was identified. The galaxy is moving towards Milky Way at a speed of 250,000 miles per hour. Based on this, scientists concluded that the head-on encounter will happen in about 4 billion years. After this, the two galaxies will completely merge in an additional two billion years and become one elliptical galaxy.
