Here’s some mildly terrifying news to start out your 2019: the Large Magellanic Cloud is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. In other words, us. This isn’t the first time we’ve been projected to bump into one of our cosmic neighbors; scientists projected that we’d hit the Andromeda galaxy in about 6 billion years. According to new research published in the Royal Astronomical Society, though, as the LMC is projected to hit us in about 2 billion years.
Now, there’s good news, bad news, and worse news here. The good news is that the LMC is mostly gas, so the chances of this collision actually affecting Earth are minimal at best (plus, y’know, 2 billion years, who knows if the Earth will even still be here). The bad news is that the impact could potentially activate a long-dormant black hole within the Milky Way, which would start devouring gas and leaking radiation. The worse news is that the impact could knock the entire Solar System out of the Milky Way and hurtling into another part of the universe. Again, the solar system could be thrown like a Frisbee and we’d probably never even feel it, but it is a little intimidating to know that, however slowly it may be, an enormous cosmic entity is heading right for us.
