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Milky Way May Escape Fated Collision With Andromeda Galaxy
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: For years, astronomers thought it was the Milky Way's destiny to collide with its near neighbor the Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now. But a new simulation finds a 50% chance the impending crunch will end up a near-miss, at least for the nex...
A study from 2008 suggested a Milky Way-Andromeda merger was inevitable within the next 5 billion years, and that in the process the Sun and Earth would get gravitationally grabbed by Andromeda for a time before ending up in the distant outer suburbs of the resulting elliptical, which the researchers dub "Milkomeda." First, they ran the simulation including just the Milky Way and Andromeda and found that they merged in slightly less than half of the cases -- lower odds than other recent estimates. But with the inclusion of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that is the fourth largest in the Local Group, those chances dropped back down to a coin flip.
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