Milky Way ties with neighbor in galactic arms race

[SCantiGOP]

2. The collision of individual stars

I’ve been watching a series on The Science Channel called How the Universe Wotks.
One episode dealt with this merging of the two galaxies. To illustrate how vast the distances are between the estimated 2 billion stars they said this is how likely it would be for two to collide: take an area twice the size of the Pacific Ocean. Randomly drop a particle the size of a pollen grain somewhere over that area while releasing a like sized particle to float up from somewhere on the ocean floor. The probability of those two colliding is equal to the chances of two of the stars colliding.