You can see our galaxy's future with the naked eye tonight.
Step outside on a clear night and look towards the constellation Andromeda. That faint smudge you can just make out — 2.5 million light-years away — is already moving towards us at around 110 kilometres per second. In roughly 4.5 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will begin to merge into a single sprawling structure astronomers sometimes call Milkomeda. It sounds catastrophic. It really isn't — not for the stars, anyway. Galaxies are mostly empty space. Individual stars are so extraordinarily far apart from one another that virtually none will actually collide. Two vast stellar cities will pass through each other, tangle, reshape, and settle — all without a single true crash. The drama is real. The destruction, less so. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe delivered straight to you.