The Milky Way’s collision with Andromeda, once thought to be inevitable, is now being called into question. Until now, astronomers had predicted that our galaxy will merge with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years in a massive collision that will last several billion more years. However, a new study published on the preprint server arXiv suggests a 50 percent chance of avoiding this collision. The study is provocatively titled “Apocalypse When?”
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away from Earth. It is slowly approaching our galaxy. In 2021, the Hubble telescope recorded Andromeda approaching our galaxy at 400,000 km/h. Scientists then calculated that the collision would take place in about 4.5 billion years, and two billion years later, the galaxies would completely merge and form a single elliptical structure, shifting the solar system to a new region.
The new study, led by astrophysicist Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki, uses data from the Gaia and Hubble telescopes to analyze the motion and mass of the largest galaxies in the Local Group, including Andromeda, the Milky Way, the Triangulum galaxy system and the Large Magellanic Cloud. They modeled the evolution of these galaxies over the next 10 billion years on a supercomputer and found that merger occurred in less than half of the scenarios.
“Currently, claims about the impending demise of our galaxy appear greatly exaggerated,” the researchers write in their study.
The discovery casts doubt on previous predictions of an impending merger. Scientists point out that future data from Gaia will help measure the motion and mass of galaxies more accurately, and only then can the fate of our galactic neighborhood be accurately determined.
We have already reported how the Andromeda catastrophe triggered a massive galactic migration.
According to Gizmodo
