                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2022 June 6

          Milky Way Galaxy Doomed: Collision with Andromeda Pending
     Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI); T.
                          Hallas; and A. Mellinger

   Explanation: 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 here is a combination of images depicting the sky of a world
   (Earth?) in the distant future when the outer parts of each galaxy
   begin to collide. 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.

                    Tomorrow's picture: altar of dragons
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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                             & Michigan Tech. U.

