Most astronomers believe that sometime in the distant future, our galaxy, the Milky Way, and Andromeda, the closest galaxy, will collide in a massive cosmic clash. However, they can's still accurately predict whether this will occur in 2, 5 or 10 billion years.
If the descendants of
Homo sapiens will still inhabit Earth in, say, 2 billion years, they will witness a truly spectacular cosmic show. This will happen well before the sun collapses into a white dwarf, and destroys the Earth in the process.
This cosmic collision could easily push our solar system around to the farthest regions of our galaxy, and there is even a small chance we could end up in the neighboring galaxy. These predictions were made by astronomers T. J. Cox and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
To calculate this, they used computer simulations of the collision by estimating the relative speed between the two galaxies (the speed of our galaxy added to Andromeda's speed), and also the dark matter and interstellar gas, which act like brakes, exerting a drag force on the galaxy's motion.
For now, Andromeda is located at 2.3 million light-years from our galaxy, but the two galaxies are approaching each other at 120 kilometers per second. Still, they were not able to predict Andromeda's sideways speed, and they did not rule out the possibility of the galaxy missing us entirely because of that speed. "I think it's very likely they will come together," Loeb says. "The issue is, will it be [in] three billion years, five billion years or 10 billion years?"
They estimated that the two galaxies would form a supergalaxy, which could be called the Andromedy Way, or Milkomeda, and our solar system would have a 50 percent chance of being swept to a wispy tail extending from Milkomeda, three times further out from the galactic center than it is located now.
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