PREVIEW

Gaia Telescope Reveals Precise Date of the Milky Way's Last Act of Galactic Cannibalism. Space.com reports that the latest findings from the Gaia space telescope suggest that our Milky Way Galaxy may have cannibalized a smaller galaxy relatively recently. The last major collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy appears to have occurred billions of years closer to now than previously believed. Scientists have long known that the Milky Way was formed through a series of violent collisions with other galaxies. These massive collisions distribute stars from the consumed galaxy throughout the halo that surrounds the Milky Way's main disk. Galactic cannibalism sends "wrinkles" through the galaxy, impacting different families of stars in a number of ways. Gaia now looks to retell the story of the Milky Way by quantifying those wrinkles. "We get wrinklier as we age, but our work reveals that the opposite is true for the Milky Way. It’s a sort of cosmic Benjamin Button, getting less wrinkly over time." "By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way experienced its last big crash – and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.", Thomas Donlon, Study team leader of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and University of Alabama scientist, via Space.com. Astronomers have only been aware of these wrinkles since Gaia discovered them in 2018. The latest findings represent the first time they have been extensively investigated to find the precise timing of the collision that spawned them. THIS VIDEO MUST NOT BE EDITED FOR LENGTH TO COMBINE WITH OTHER CONTENT