What is galactic archaeology?! #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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What is galactic archeology? Because At its heart, it's figuring out the Milky Way’s history by treating the stars as fossils. The shape of a galaxy can tell you a lot about how its evolved over time and what’s happened in its history. We know that when two galaxies collide and merge together, you scramble all the stars and gas and dust, and turn a nice flat spiral galaxy, into an elliptical galaxy, or a sphere of stars. The stars are all orbiting the centre still just on different planes. So the shape can tell us a lot, and for the Milky Way this is a bit more difficult than looking at other galaxies. We’re stuck inside it, so figuring out the overall shape requires a bit more work. But essentially what we do is record the positions and distances to stars to build up a 3D map of the Milky Way to reveal its shape. One of the things that pops out is something known as the sagittarius stream, a huge loop of stars that’s come from our merger with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which w