Produced by: Tarun Mishra Designed by: Manoj Kumar
A new study has revealed that the Milky Way galaxy experienced a significant collision with another galaxy much more recently than previously thought.
While the Milky Way is known to have had several past collisions and is on a future collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, this new finding shifts our understanding of its collision timeline.
Each galactic collision triggers ripples, creating wrinkles in different star families and affecting their movement and behavior in space.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, which maps the universe, has discovered a large group of stars with unusual orbits in the Milky Way’s halo, thought to be remnants of a recent collision event.
These stars are believed to have been adopted into the Milky Way during an event known as the ‘last major merger,’ involving a massive dwarf galaxy.
Thomas Donlon of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute explained that unlike humans who get wrinklier with age, the Milky Way becomes less wrinkly over time, allowing scientists to trace back its collision history.
The team estimates that this significant merger occurred between eight and eleven billion years ago, during the Milky Way’s early stages. However, Gaia’s data now suggests another merger event, the Virgo Radial Merger, happened less than three billion years ago.
This recent finding, identifying the Virgo Radial Merger around 2.7 billion years ago, suggests multiple smaller galaxies were involved, challenging the notion that all related stars came from one ancient merger. Gaia’s data continues to reshape our understanding of the Milky Way’s past, highlighting the telescope’s crucial role in cosmic exploration.