Buttercup Nike Swoosh shirt

June 29, 2023

The two galaxies are presently a Buttercup Nike Swoosh shirt two million light years, give or take, from each other. They are expected to collide, and eventually merge, several billion years from now. Don’t worry, it won’t affect us much. For starters, we won’t be around. The Earth will be a dead world by then, with the Sun near the end of its life as a main sequence star. But even if that weren’t the case, stars are so small compared to the distances between them, no individual solar systems are expected to collide as this merger takes place. It cannot be excluded with certainty of course, but it is unlikely that any star during the merger event will come much closer to the Sun than our nearest stellar neighbors are at present, i.e., never approaching our Sun closer than a couple of light years.

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