A 12-billion-year-old fossil found inside the Milky Way

By Dr. Becky

Community Score: 50% | 95.9K views | 4w

0 community ratings: null thumbs up, null thumbs down

AD | Get started with Brilliant’s tutor for free at https://brilliant.org/drbecky and save 20% off an annual subscription | Hubble just added a chapter to the Milky Way’s entire origins story, and we’ve got to talk about it. Because this month, Massari and collaborators published this research paper claiming to have found evidence for another galaxy merger in the Milky Way’s past, nearly 12 billion years ago. The Milky Way is our home, a galaxy of 100s of billions of stars, including the Sun and the solar system. From what we can tell living inside of it, it’s a beautiful spiral shape that’s 13.6 billion years old. But how did it evolve over those billions of years to end up looking like this? That’s an area of research known as galactic archeology; digging through the evidence left behind to work out what happened in the past. And all our previous research has pointed towards two mergers with other galaxies in the Milky Way’s past. One that’s still ongoing, and one that happened

Tags: dr beckie, astronomie, physiks, dr beccy, smethers