While the visuals would be stunning, what's interesting to me is how much our knowledge of the cosmos has advanced in the past 6 years between that article bein

While the visuals would be stunning, what's interesting to me is how much our knowledge of the cosmos has advanced in the past 6 years between that article being written and now. We now know the Milky Way is probably nearly 200,000 light years across[1]. And that it's not only much larger, but much more massive - probably larger than Andromeda[2]. When we talk about these collisions being billions of years away, we're also really only talking about the main portions of the galaxy - all of the globular clusters are going to start interacting way sooner. We're already seeing star formation in the Milky Way's globular clusters as a result of interaction with the Large Magellanic Cloud, even though we're 2.4ish billion years from the primary collision occurring [3]. Last year NASA also came out with a bunch of images on what the night sky will look like as the Andromeda collision occurs: https://kottke.org/19/10/behold-our-dazzling-night-sky-when-the-milky-way-collides-with-andromeda-in-4-billion-years https://kottke.org/19/10/behold-our-dazzling-night-sky-when-... 1. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/milky-way-galaxy-may-be-much-bigger-we-thought-ncna876966 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/milky-way-galaxy-may-be... 2. https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-is-much-more-massive-than-previously-thought-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-is-much-more-massi... 3. https://www.universetoday.com/144556/an-upcoming-impact-with-the-magellanic-clouds-is-already-causing-star-formation-in-the-milky-way/ https://www.universetoday.com/144556/an-upcoming-impact-with...