“7 February 2019 – ESA’s Gaia satellite has looked beyond our Galaxy and explored two nearby galaxies to reveal the stellar motions within them and how they will one day interact and collide with the Milky Way – with surprising results.
Our Milky Way belongs to a large gathering of galaxies known as the Local Group and, along with the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies – also referred to as M31 and M33, respectively – makes up the majority of the group’s mass.
Astronomers have long suspected that Andromeda will one day collide with the Milky Way, completely reshaping our cosmic neighbourhood. However, the three-dimensional movements of the Local Group galaxies remained unclear, painting an uncertain picture of the Milky Way’s future.”
[…]
“As Andromeda’s motion differs somewhat from previous estimates, the galaxy is likely to deliver more of a glancing blow to the Milky Way than a head-on collision. This will take place not in 3.9 billion years’ time, but in 4.5 billion – some 600 million years later than anticipated.”
Study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab001b/meta
Image: The future orbital trajectories of three spiral galaxies: our Milky Way (blue), Andromeda, also known as M31 (red), and Triangulum, also known as M33 (green). The circle indicates the current position of each galaxy, and their future trajectories have been calculated using data from the second release of ESA’s Gaia mission. The Milky Way is shown as an artist’s impression, while the images of Andromeda and Triangulum are based on Gaia data. Arrows along the trajectories indicate the estimated direction of each galaxy’s motion and their positions, 2.5 billion years into the future, while crosses mark their estimated position in about 4.5 billion years. Approximately 4.5 billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda will make their first close passage around one another at a distance of approximately 400 000 light-years. The galaxies will then continue to move closer to one another and eventually merge to form an elliptical galaxy. The linear scale of 1 million light years refers to the galaxy trajectories; the galaxy images are not to scale. Credit: Orbits: E. Patel, G. Besla (University of Arizona), R. van der Marel (STScI); Images: ESA (Milky Way); ESA/Gaia/DPAC (M31, M33).