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.
Two giant clusters of galaxies observed in the process of colliding are going so hard that their dark matter has basically detached from normal matter and flown ahead.
The Milky Way is only as massive as it is because of collisions and mergers with other galaxies.
New research suggests that, contrary to previous estimates, Andromeda galaxy isn’t much bigger than the Milky Way, and is practically our twin.
The Hubble Space Telescope was used to capture imagery of NGC 5256 (also known as Markarian 266). The interacting galaxies are 350 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Ursa Major.
