Based on the most detailed measurements, scientists have found that our solar system, the Milky Way, is moving at 600,000 kilometers per hour, 100,000 mph faster than originally thought.
The faster rotation also means that its mass must be similar to that of Andromeda, about 270 billion times the mass of the sun.
This means that the gravitational pull that the Milky Way exerts on its neighboring galaxies is stronger, meaning that a crash would occur earlier than expected.
The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two largest in our cosmic neighborhood.
Our solar system is about 28,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, Andromeda is about two million light-years away.
The research, presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California, argues that the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will happen within the next seven million years.
Colliding planets, stars, and galaxies are thought to merge to form a new, large galaxy.
Karl Menten, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, and Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts used a radio telescope called the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) to make accurate measurements of the Milky Way as it moved through space.
"These measurements are the revision of our understanding of the structure and motions of our galaxy," Dr. Menten said.
Authors: Val
