One Brick Short

It’s a clash of galactic proportions, a collision that is inevitable, given the gravity of relations between the two.

No, we’re not talking about Israel and Hamas, we’re talking about Milky Way (a.k.a. Snickers Without Nuts) and Andromeda.

Turns out Snickers Without Nuts is significantly bigger than we once thought, spinning itself dizzy out in the middle of the universe on a collision course brought about by gravity and billions of years of history. But it’s likely not capable of resisting the Andromeda strain and will sooner than later slam into the other galaxy, causing a cosmic traffic accident of Northern Virginia proportions.

According to the Associated Press, which knows everything, scientists have determined that Snickers Without Nuts is 15 percent wider and 50 percent denser, not unlike much of Congress. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, Calif.

That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

“Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant, and that we were the little sister of Andromeda,“ Reid said. “But now it’s more like we’re fraternal twins.“

The scientists used 10 radio telescope antennas to measure the brightest newborn stars in the galaxy at different times in Earth’s orbit around the sun, according to the AP. That helped determine that Snickers Without Nuts is spinning around its center at 568,000 miles per hour, fast enough to whip up any body’s chewy nougat center.

It also helped determine that Snickers Without Nuts has a special dark center, where the heavy chocolate gathers, about 150 percent more darkness.

Being bigger means the gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is stronger so the long-forecast collision between the neighboring galaxies is likely to happen sooner and less likely to be a glancing blow, unless someone gets more fluffy and less stuffy.

But don’t fasten your seatbelts, yet. That’s at least 2 to 3 billion years away.