Not in a Billion Years

In the recent Hubble press release about the collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, we provided some artistic illustrations of what a future night sky might look like. It shows the fantastic sights as Andromeda approaches, smashes through, and eventually merges with our galaxy.
Although it may seem like splitting hairs, I note [...]

After the Milky Way-Andromeda merger, our Sun will likely be tossed into a looping orbit around the newly formed elliptical galaxy.In the recent Hubble press release about the collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, we provided some artistic illustrations of what a future night sky might look like. It shows the fantastic sights as Andromeda approaches, smashes through, and eventually merges with our galaxy.Although it may seem like splitting hairs, I note that we specifically did not say that those illustrations show what Earth’s night sky would look like. There are three reasons for this.First, those illustrations were motivated by views from a computer simulation. The viewpoint inside the simulation was held fixed in space at the Sun’s current location relative to the center of the galaxy. Though the Sun continually orbits the core of the Milky Way, ...