News Astronomy

Milky Way will be hit head-on

Andromeda galaxy will smash directly into ours

By Alexandra Witze

- More than 2 years ago

The monstrous Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way are destined to hit head-on, not in a glancing blow, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show.

Four billion years from now, a collision between the Milky Way (left) and Andromeda (right) galaxies will have ripped out streams of stars, warped the galactic shapes and turned Earth’s night sky into a dramatic swirl of starlight.