this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's the other part I find fascinating; these two galaxies are gonna intersect, but our solar system probably won't hit anything. That's so gnar.

[โ€“] Zink@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

It's not just that, but it is unlikely that any star in our galaxy will collide with any star in Andromeda.

I think it's easy to think of galaxies as individual things, like these nodes in the universe where all the stuff is stored. But galaxies are incredibly vast and incredibly empty.

I love the video this guy did on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRmyY3Db1Y

The part that stuck with me is that if you made the Milky Way the size of the United States, our gigantic sun holding 99.86% of the matter in the solar system would be microscopic -- the size of a red blood cell. And iirc, the planet earth would be all the way down to the size of a virus.