The Milky Way was feeding on more galaxies in its early days than astronomers thought.
The Jaya The spacecraft has unearthed the remnants of an ancient cosmic collision in our Milky Way, revealing a previously unknown galaxy, now called “Pontus,” that was sucked up by the Milky Way long before our galaxy came into being the way it looks now.
Pontus was a galaxy that got lost near Milky Way The European Space Agency, which operates GAIA, said, a permit Thursday (17 February).
Related: Watch a virtual map of the Milky Way from the European Gaia spacecraft
The European Space Agency added that such merger events are important for learning about the Milky Way, because it shows the “family tree” of smaller galaxies that helped make the Milky Way what it is today.
Gaia was launched into space nearly a decade ago, in 2013, on an ambitious mission to map the sky in three dimensions with greater precision than ever before. Mission directors say Gaia’s website.
This latest work on galactic mergers arose from a study of the Milky Way’s halo, a region filled with globular clusters of ancient stars, low-metal stars, and other objects of interest. In a press release about the study, the European Space Agency said that “foreign galaxies” in the corona may appear in this region in different ways, depending on the speed of the collision.
“When a foreign galaxy falls into our region, great gravitational forces known as tidal forces separate them,” the European Space Agency stated. “If this process goes slowly, the stars from the merging galaxy will form a broad stellar stream that can be easily distinguished in the corona. If the process goes quickly, the stars of the merging galaxy will be more scattered throughout the corona and there will be no clear signature to be apparent.”
However, stars aren’t the only way we can detect a compact galaxy. If the intruder contains globular stars or small satellite galaxies, they may also appear in the halo. The new study focused on searching for this data.
Scholars have called the incident after Greek mythology, which identified Pontus as one of the first sons of Gaia, the goddess of the earth.
Besides finding the Pontus event, the team identified five other distinct fusion groups (already known to science) and six potential further fusion groups in the data. The five events already known are called Sagittarius, Cetus, Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus, LMS-1/Wukong, and Arjuna/Sequoia/Iitoi.
The European Space Agency noted that Pontos and most of these other events occurred around the same time period, 8 billion to 10 billion years ago, but Sagittarius was most recent 5 billion to 6 billion years ago. “As a result, the Milky Way has not yet been able to completely disrupt it,” the agency added of the Sagittarius event.
a study Based on research published Thursday (February 17) in The Astrophysical Journal, led by Khayati Malhan, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. The work was based on an early release of Gaia’s third large data set, which is due to drop on June 13.
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