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AN EERIE simulation video of the Milky Way merging with another nearby galaxy has been shared by Nasa.
In around 4.5 billion years, the Milky Way will collide with its closest galaxy neighbor, Andromeda.
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And a simulation video shared by Nasa shows exactly how it is expected to happen.
"Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy," said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore in 2012.
In the footage, the Milky Way and Andromeda are seen as two bright orbs, dancing around one another.
They circle each other before ultimately colliding into one single galaxy that throws both their respective objects into new orbits.
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Nasa was able to simulate the predicted chaotic event using measurements taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
At present, Andromeda, which is a barrelled spiral galaxy, is located about 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.
But it is inexorably racing toward the Milky Way at a rate of around 70 miles (113 km) per second.
In fact, one 2020 study published in the Astrophysical Journal confirmed that the collision between the two galaxies is already underway.
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Merger timeline
In around 2 billion years, the disk of the Andromeda galaxy will look noticeably larger.
Meanwhile, in 3.85 billion years, the sky will show a new star formation.
Four billion years later, Andromeda will appear stretched as the Milky Way becomes warped.
And in 7billion years, the merged galaxies will have formed a huge elliptical galaxy.
What will happen when the two galaxies merge?
Galaxies collide all across the universe – in many ways when a galactic merger occurs, the two galaxies are like two ships passing in the night.
"Stars in a galaxy are spaced so far apart - grains of sand separated by the length of a football field - that the Andromeda stars [will] simply pass by," Nasa writes.
"But galaxies are more than just stars. They contain giant clouds of gas and dust, and when galaxies collide, these clouds smash into one another."
"The clouds contain the raw materials needed to make new stars, and it is the collision between clouds that has triggered a starry baby boom!"
That said, the roughly trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy will throw our 300 billion stars and planets into new orbits around the newly merged center.
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By this time, Earth will be gone because our Sun will have become a red giant and consumed our planet.
However, it's possible that by then humans will be an interplanetary species and not even living on Earth.