Despite the apocalyptic visuals of a cosmic merger, individual stars almost never crash. Instead, billions are violently scrambled or flung into deep space.
The distances between stars are so vast that a galaxy is overwhelmingly empty space. If the Sun were the size of a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be another ping-pong ball sitting roughly 700 miles (1,100 km) away. A galaxy collision is less like a demolition derby and more like two sparse flocks of birds flying through each other. The stars themselves sail past one another untouched.
While the stars survive the encounter, their surrounding architecture is completely destroyed by gravity. As the two immense masses pass through one another, their combined pull radically rewrites stellar orbits.
In a typical merger between two spiral galaxies, the neat, rotating disks of stars are completely disrupted. Many stars are flung into chaotic, highly elongated orbits that crisscross the new galactic center in random directions. Over hundreds of millions of years, this scattered swarm settles into a giant, featureless ball of stars known as an elliptical galaxy.
Not every star makes it into the new structure. The intense gravitational whiplash during the initial approach often tears long ribbons of stars away from the outer edges of the galaxies. These "tidal tails" can stretch for hundreds of thousands of light-years, permanently ejecting billions of stars into the lonely void of intergalactic space.
While the established stars avoid direct impact, the sprawling clouds of cold hydrogen gas between them do not. The gas clouds smash into each other, compressing violently and triggering a massive, furious wave of new star formation known as a starburst. This sudden ignition produces millions of huge, blue stars that quickly burn through their fuel and detonate as supernovae.
Once the gas is entirely consumed by this explosive birth cycle or blown away by the resulting stellar winds, the merged galaxy loses its ability to make new stars. The massive blue stars die out, leaving behind only the older, cooler, long-lived red stars, slowly orbiting in a quiet, dead elliptical galaxy.