Will our Milky Way Galaxy
collide one day with its larger neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy? Most likely,
yes.
Careful plotting of
slight displacements of M31's stars relative to background galaxies on recent Hubble Space Telescope images
indicate that the center of M31 could be on
a direct collision
course with
the center of our home galaxy.
Still, the errors in
sideways velocity appear sufficiently large to admit a good chance that
the central parts of the two galaxies will miss, slightly, but will become close enough for
their outer halos to become gravitationally
entangled.
Once that happens, the
two galaxies will become bound, dance
around, and eventually merge to become
one large elliptical galaxy --
over the next few billion years.
Pictured
below is
an artist's illustration of the sky of a world in the distant future when the
central parts of each galaxy begin to destroy each other.
The exact future of our Milky Way and the entire surrounding Local Group of Galaxies is likely to remain an active topic of research for years to come.
