A Look at the Milky Way Future

We’ve got about 4 billion years before the Milky Way galaxy is no more. We’re on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, and now—thanks to researchers with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research—we have an updated idea what that galatic crash might look like.

In the video above researchers show a computer simulation of this perfectly natural aspect of life as a galaxy. To be a galaxy is to grow and, occasionally, to eat or be eaten by other galaxies.

Right now, the Milky Way and Andromeda are roughly 2.5 million light-years apart. They’re speeding toward each other at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour.