NASA Hubble telescope study indicates milky Way will one day 4 billion years from now run into the Andromeda galaxy
The galaxy fusion prediction comes from “painstaking NASA Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both,” NASA said.
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NASA said while the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.
To make matters more complicated, M31’s small companion, what’s known as the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first, NASA said.
“In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits,” said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York in a statement. “The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits. The galaxies’ cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy.”
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Astronomers say it has long been known that M31 is moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to travel from here to the moon in one hour. But NASA noted that until now, astronomers have not been able to measure M31’s sideways motion in the sky, despite attempts dating back more than a century to figure out if the galaxies might run into each other. The Hubble Space Telescope team, led by Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, conducted extraordinarily precise observations of the sideways motion of M31 that remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way, NASA said.
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