The Milky Way, as we know it today, hasn’t changed much in billions of years. But give it enough time, and eventually everything will disappear. Image credit: ESO/S. Guisard.

What will the death of the Milky Way look like?

Every star must eventually run out of fuel and die… but did you know the galaxy itself will come to an end someday?

“Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.” -Jean Dubuffet

On Earth, we’ve got another billion years or two before the oceans boil and the planet becomes uninhabitable. The Sun will heat up, swell into a red giant, fuse helium in its core, then blow off its outer layers and contract into a white dwarf. But new stars will pop up, too, and shine, and keep the galaxy alive and rife with stars far into the future. But even our own Milky Way will cease to exist: first as we know it, and later on, entirely. When enough time passes, there will be no stars, stellar remnants, or even black holes left at all. This is the cosmic story of the ultimate end of our home in space.

Our Local Group of galaxies is dominated by Andromeda and the Milky Way, but our cosmic neck-of-the-woods contains so much more. Image credit: Andrew Z. Colvin.

The cosmic story of our galaxy’s demise starts right here, today. We need to look close to home, at our own Milky Way and its surroundings. While we tend to…