(2). While our planet Earth is thought to be safe from any aftermath of the merging galaxies, it’s estimated that our sun might be moved into a new region of our galaxy. As a galactic collision can take over a billion years to fully run its course and we wouldn’t live long enough to see it, computer simulations have shown us an estimate of what would happen amidst a merging such as this. The Hubble Space Telescope; in measuring the motions of the Andromeda galaxy, now tells us that Andromeda is falling toward the Milky Way galaxy due to the gravitational pull of both galaxies. (6). Because the collision is said to be head-on, many stars will most likely be thrown into different orbits as an effect of the new galactic center. Andromeda is currently moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 per hour. As fast as this may seem, it will still take approximately 4 billion years before it impacts our galaxy. (6). This merger will cause; not only stars and planets to move around into different orbits, but the Milky Way will lose its flat shape with the central bulge in the middle, and instead end up as an elliptical-shaped …show more content…
The Milky Way galaxy is thought to have formed by consuming multiple smaller galaxies. These collisions can trigger rapid star formations which cause the galaxy to be very luminous at infrared wavelengths. This rapid star formation can make systems thousands of times brighter than our own galaxy while active. “Many of the massive stars that are produced become supernovae whose explosive deaths enrich the environment with carbon, oxygen, and all the other elements that are essential for life. Interacting galaxies are important not only in shedding light on how galaxies evolve, form stars, and seed the interstellar medium, but because they can be very bright and seen across cosmological distances.”