Two Galaxies Are About To Collide — And Almost Nothing Will Actually Hit

A whole galaxy is heading straight for us right now. Andromeda — the most distant thing your naked eye can spot at 2.5 million light-years away — is closing in at around 110 kilometres per second. In roughly 4.5 billion years, it will begin merging with the Milky Way. That sounds catastrophic. Here is the twist: almost no stars will collide. Galaxies look dense from the outside, but the space between individual stars is so vast that two of them smashing into each other is vanishingly unlikely. What you get instead is an extraordinary slow-motion gravitational dance — arms stretching, orbits thrown into chaos, two galaxies gradually becoming one. Astronomers have even given the result a name: Milkomeda. Follow for more of the universe, one true fact at a time.