Is The Milky Way On A Collision Course?

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

The Andromeda galaxy lies just beyond (...OK, about 2.5 million light-years beyond) our galaxy, the Milky Way. For the past hundred years or so, scientists thought these galaxies existed in a long-term dance of doom — destined to crash into one another and combine into one big galactic soup. But today on the show, Regina and computational astrophysicist Arpit Arora explain why a recent paper out in the journal Nature Astronomy suggests this cosmic game of bumper cars may never come to a head at all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The House of Representatives has approved a White House request to claw back two years of previously approved funding for public media.
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0:17.1	Please take a stand for public media today at goacpr.org.
0:22.6	Thank you.
0:24.4	You're listening to Shortwave.
0:27.2	From NPR.
0:29.6	Hi, Shortwavers.
0:30.9	Emily Kwong here with my co-host and our resident astrophysicist Regina Barber.
0:35.1	Hey, Gina.
0:36.0	Hey, Em.
0:36.7	Okay, we are talking about, am I reading this
0:38.9	right, Neighbors? That's where I am. Are you ready for an astronomy quiz about neighbors?
0:44.3	As a PBS kid raised on Mr. Rogers, yes, I love neighbors. Let's go. Okay, so which planets are the
0:50.6	nearest neighbors to Earth? Mars and Venus.
0:54.7	Yes.
0:55.5	Okay.
0:56.1	Let's zoom out past our solar system.
0:58.5	Okay.
0:59.1	Which star is the closest to our sun?
1:02.0	I don't know.
1:02.9	What is it?
1:04.0	Proxima Centauri.
	...

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