Our Milky Way is weird – but a catastrophe will soon straighten everything out

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is, we must unfortunately admit, rather an oddball specimen of a spiral galaxy. The black hole at its center is underdeveloped (it is too light by a whole order of magnitude), it is surrounded by a (too) low mass halo of stars with extremely low metal content, and it has an unusually large companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

But there is some good news, as astronomers report in a recent paper: in just 2.4 billion years (the universe is currently 13.8 b...