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New study casts doubt on the likelihood of Milky Way collision with Andromeda
g-held theory that our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with its largest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, in 4.5 billion years-time. Scientists used data from NASA’s Hubble and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescopes to simulate how the Milky Way, Andromeda and their most massive satellite galaxies could evolve over the next 10 billion years.
There could, however, be cosmic firework: gas will be funnelled to the centre and emit huge amounts of radiation as it falls into a central black hole at the heart of the merger remnant. The research team is already looking ahead to the Gaia space telescope which will soon deliver more precise measurements of some of the most crucial variables within the galaxies, including the transverse motion of Andromeda. Carlos Frenk, co-author of the research and Professor in our Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: “It is amazing that we are able to simulate the evolution of gigantic collections of stars over billions of years and figure out their ultimate fate.
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