What will happen to our galaxy?

If you think that what's going to happen to our sun is crazy, you ain't heard nothin' yet. We're in a galaxy that's headed for a crash with our sister galaxy Andromeda, and man, it's going to be one heck of a collision!

But, we have plenty of time. It's not going to take place for four billion years.

Andromeda is the big boy of galaxies in our Local Group, which consists of the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy and lots of smaller satellite galaxies. The Andromeda galaxy is headed towards us at around 110 kilometers per second. That sounds like a high rate of speed, but the distance to Andromeda is about 3 million light years. That's a long way off.

Andromeda contains approximately a trillion stars, while our Milky Way galaxy has around 300 to 400 billion stars. Each galaxy contains a supermassive black hole in its center.

What's going to happen when this wreck occurs? Well, that's a good question. As it turns out, there will be almost no star collisions, but there will be a lot of action. For one thing, the large amount of gas in each galaxy will collide at high velocity and heat up. The sky will be aglow with these interactions.

The sky at that time will no longer look like it does now. There will be lots of new stars being formed by the action of the collision. The sky will be bright with lots of hot gas and new star formation. The familiar Milky Way will be no more.

Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way galaxy on edge and all of the stars will be thrown out of orbit around their respective galaxies' massive black holes. The structures of both galaxies, essentially nice spirals, will be ripped apart in a gravitational orgy that will send the stars asunder only to be pulled back into a huge elliptical galaxy, or so the theory goes.

Both galaxies have supermassive black holes in their respective centers. These two behemoths will eventually collide and form one really super duper massive black hole. It's possible that this black hole will become a quasar and produce powerful energy jets from the combined poles.

Although the solar system will not collide with other stars, it could be sucked down near the supermassive black hole and become the desert for a big meal of other stars and dust, but this won't happen at first. The solar system will be shot out much further from either galactic core. It won't matter because by that time the sun will have gobbled the Earth up or, at the least, the Earth will be too hot to be habitable.

Actually, all of this is based on computer simulations, and although the two galaxies will collide for certain, there is no way to know what will result. There is even a possibility that the Triangulum galaxy will be pulled into the wreck. All I can say is that it would be one spectacular sight to see, but alas, we'll all be gone long before it happens.

Thanks for reading.