In 2012, researchers concluded that the collision is sure to happen. They used the Hubble Space Telescope to track the motion of stars in Andromeda between 2002 and 2010 with great accuracy. Andromeda's tangential or sideways velocity with respect to the Milky Way was much smaller than the speed of approach. Therefore, it is expected that it will collide with the Milky Way in around 4 billion years.