Nasa has shared a video simulation of the Milky Way merging and another galaxy in EERIE.
In approximately 4.5 billion year, the Milky way will collide with Andromeda, its nearest galaxy neighbor.
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Nasa also shared a simulation video showing exactly how it is supposed to occur.
“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,”Roeland van den Marel, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore 2012
The footage shows the Milky Way as Andromeda dancing around each other.
They eventually circle one another before colliding into a single galaxy, which throws their respective objects into new orbits.
Nasa was capable of simulating the predicted chaotic event by using measurements made with the Hubble Space Telescope.
At present, Andromeda, which is a barrelled spiral galaxy, is located about 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.
However, it is racing inexorably towards the Milky Way at a speed of approximately 70 miles (113km) per second.
In fact, there is one 2020Studypublished in the Astrophysical Journal confirmed that the collision between the two galaxies is already underway.
Merger timeline
The Andromeda galaxy’s disk will be noticeably larger after approximately 2 billion years.
In the meantime, in 3.85 million years, a new star formation will appear in the sky.
Andromeda will appear stretched four billion years later as the Milky Way is warped.
The merger galaxies will eventually form a large elliptical star in 7 billion years.
What will happen when these galaxies combine?
Galaxies collide all across the universe – in many ways when a galactic merger occurs, the two galaxies are like two ships passing in the night.
“Stars in a galaxy are spaced so far apart – grains of sand separated by the length of a football field – that the Andromeda stars [will] simply pass by,” NasaWrites.
“But galaxies are more than just stars. They contain giant clouds of gas and dust, and when galaxies collide, these clouds smash into one another.”
“The clouds contain the raw materials needed to make new stars, and it is the collision between clouds that has triggered a starry baby boom!”
The roughly trillion stars in Andromeda will throw our 300 million stars and planets into new orbits around its newly merged center.
By this time, Earth will be gone because our Sun will have become a red giant and consumed our planet.
But it is possible that humans may be an interplanetary species, and not live on Earth.