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    The Stories That Galaxies Tell

    by Steve Nadis Feb 20, 2014 2 minutes

    The biggest merger to ever hit these parts is coming—a union that promises to be more tumultuous than that of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, offer more star power than Brangelina, and deliver more jet propulsion than the new American Airlines–US Airways conglomerate. We’re talking about the coming together of the Milky Way galaxy and its nearest large neighbor, Andromeda, in a collision that scientists now deem inevitable. This celestial amalgamation will begin in about 4 billion years and finish within another 2 billion, producing a new, larger elliptical galaxy in place of the two spirals that originally conjoined.

    Mergers are routine rites of passage for galaxies. “All of the biggest and best studied galaxies around us today are either currently interacting galaxies or collisions waiting to happen,” says Roeland van der Marel of the Space

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