To summarize, while it is indeed true that our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Andromeda Galaxy (the largest neighboring galaxy) are on an inevitable collision course, there’s no reason to be alarmed yet. These two massive galaxies have billions of stars, and trillions of tons of gas, dust, and dark matter, and they’re hurtling toward each other at approximately 110 km/s (67 mi/s). Fast enough, right? But, when you take into consideration the nearly 2.5 million light-year distance between them, it might seem like a glacial pace in cosmic terms.

According to astronomers, the projected time for these two galaxies to collide is roughly 4-5 billion years. Which would coincide with the time the sun is projected to grow into a red giant; which may seem close in terms of humanity’s lifetime (especially since we still use rotary phones), however, in terms of the universe’s timeline, that’s relatively near.

However, here’s where things get really cool: A “collision” in space doesn’t look anything like what we see in bumper car rides at a carnival. The majority of the stars in the galaxies are so far apart that direct star-to-star collisions are extremely rare. Instead, the gravitational tug-of-war between the two galaxies will distort the shape of both galaxies, whipping stars into new orbits, and eventually merge the Milky Way and Andromeda into a single, larger elliptical galaxy, which some astronomers have called “Milkomeda.”