Study Finds 50% Chance of Milky Way-Andromeda Galaxy Collision to End in Passing By in Future 10 Billion Years

TapTechNews August 14th news, one of the consensuses in the field of astronomy is that the Milky Way will collide with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in several billion years. However, the latest modeling data shows that in the next 10 billion years, there may be a 50% chance that this collision will end up just passing by.

The relevant research results were published in preprint form on arXiv on July 31st with the title of 'Apocalypse When? No Certainty of a Milky Way–Andromeda Collision'.

TapTechNews note: Astronomer Vesto Slipher discovered in 1912 that the light of the Andromeda Galaxy had a blue shift, indicating that the galaxy is approaching our galaxy, and calculated that the Andromeda Galaxy is rushing straight towards the Milky Way at a speed of 110 kilometers per second.

A study in 2008 showed that within the next 5 billion years, the merger of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy is inevitable. During this process, the sun and the earth will be adsorbed by the gravitational force of the Andromeda Galaxy for a period of time, and then end their lives in the far suburbs of the elliptical galaxy (which the researchers call 'Milkomeda').

The only problem is that the initial calculation did not take into account the gravitational interactions between many smaller galaxies. Although the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are the two largest galaxies in the Local Group, there are about 100 smaller galaxies, and there may be more galaxies yet to be discovered.

Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki and his colleagues re-evaluated the movement and mass of celestial bodies in the Local Group in detail and input the data into the latest modeling developed by the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University.

First, they ran a simulation that only included the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy and found that the chance of their merger is slightly less than half, which is lower than other recent estimates. When they also took into account the influence of the Triangulum Galaxy, the third largest galaxy in the Local Group, the merger probability increased to about two-thirds.

However, with the addition of the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and the fourth largest galaxy in the Local Group), the possibility dropped to the level of a coin toss (fifty-fifty).

The researchers said: 'Even if the Milky Way is really going to collide, it will take about 80 billion years. From the current situation, the statement that our Milky Way is about to perish seems to be greatly exaggerated'.