Experts say Milky Way has 50-50 chance of colliding with neighbor galaxy. But when?

(NewsNation) — The collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies that scientists believed was inevitable has a much lower probability than previously thought.

The Associated Press reported last week that astronomers in Finland have determined that our galaxy has a 50-50 chance of colliding with the neighboring Andromeda within the next 10 billion years. The previous theory suggested that the two galaxies had a high probability of colliding within the next 5 billion years.

“Based on the best available data, the fate of our galaxy is still completely open,” the team wrote in the study, which appeared in Nature Astronomy.

A team led by University of Helsinki researcher Til Sawala simulated all possible scenarios using the latest data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European