colliding galaxy's?

[Natalie M]

about the recent pictures. what exactly is happening are stars crashing into each other? if this was happening to the milky way galaxy what would we see or could we actually maybe even survive it?
thank you for the answers

[Santa Claus]

the vast majority of stars won't crash into eachother, because they are simply so far apart. There will be more mergers near the centers, though. The only thing we have to worry about is getting slingshotted by another star's gravity toward the center of our galaxy, where we may eventually become a snack for the supermassive blackhole which lurks there at the center like an evil aquatic reptile with jurassic teeth, waiting to snatch up a poor unsuspecting solar system into its primitive belly, where nothing can escape, not even smaller crocodiles....

Sorry, I digress. Yeah we should be fine.

[Atom74 - the rebirth]

It's pretty improbable. You may be looking to the formations of new systems. Which is an extremely violent process yes. And planets and debris do collide all the time. But they eventually stop colliding and will enter some orbit around their star. Like the Milky Way. It's pretty doubtful that something will just fly into our galaxy and start hitting things. All the planets have very well established fields and orbits.

[Shan]

Stars are so far apart that collisions are very unlikely. It is problematic whether we will be close to a supernova, or magnetar as they move past, when M31, in Andromeda collides with the Milky Way, in some billions of years time. By then, we will have spread out from Earth, or become extinct, as all other species have done, so far.