Stumbled on a crazy stat about Andromeda while looking up galaxy collision dates

I was reading some random astronomy blog last night at 2am while my pressure washer was charging, and I learned that Andromeda is actually moving toward us at about 250,000 miles per hour. That's fast enough to go from Earth to the moon in under an hour. But what really got me was that even at that speed, it's still gonna take like 4 billion years before it actually hits the Milky Way. Has anyone else thought about how weird it is that we're basically in a slow motion car crash with another galaxy?

2 comments

2 Comments

river18225d ago

4 billion years is basically the universe's way of saying "yeah this is happening but nobody currently alive will be around to see the paperwork go through." It's like being told you have a dentist appointment in the year 6000. Kind of puts the whole "my phone battery is dying" thing in perspective, doesn't it. Always figured if two galaxies actually hit each other it would be this huge explosive thing, but apparently the space between stars is so wide that most of them just pass right through. So it's more like two clouds of confetti slowly merging than a car crash.

johnson.ryan25d ago

Andromeda's basically the cosmic version of procrastinating on something you know you have to do eventually.