From the it must be nice to get paid to be a scientist desk:
For years, it has been commonly taught that Andromeda and the Milky Way are going to smash into each other like one car going the wrong direction into another on a one-way street. Now, however, Now, it seems, however, like that was a bunch of malarkey:
It is commonly believed that our own Milky Way is on a collision course with the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. As a result of their merger, predicted in around 5 billion years, the two large spiral galaxies that define the present Local Group would form a new elliptical galaxy. Here we consider the latest and most accurate observations by the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes, along with recent consensus mass estimates, to derive possible future scenarios and identify the main sources of uncertainty in the evolution of the Local Group over the next 10 billion years. We found that the next most massive Local Group member galaxies—namely, M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud—distinctly and radically affect the Milky Way–Andromeda orbit. Although including M33 increases the merger probability, the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud runs perpendicular to the Milky Way–Andromeda orbit and makes their merger less probable. In the full system, we found that uncertainties in the present positions, motions and masses of all galaxies leave room for drastically different outcomes and a probability of close to 50% that there will be no Milky Way–Andromeda merger during the next 10 billion years. Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open.
The “maiden chained” or the “beautiful one” is not going to be ramming into us after all. Of course, since the complete opposite was asserted with confidence before, one can be forgiven for thinking that this might also be wrong, and that it might be a good thing to be a scientist that gets grants to study matters like these regardless of correct outcomes and facts. Man still has not learned, it seems, what man does not yet know or understand.