Cataclysmic collision remodeled Milky Way in the distant past – Astronomy Now



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The print of a small galaxy crushes on the milky way in the distant past. Image: ESO / Juan Carlos Muñoz

Using data from the Gaia spacecraft of the European Space Agency, astronomers have uncovered evidence indicating an old frontal collision between the young Milky Way and a smaller body called the galaxy "sausage", a cataclysmic crack. which helped to define the structure of the Earth in space, shaping the internal bulge of the galaxy, its outer halo and adding at least eight mbadive globular clusters

The small dwarf galaxy did not survive at the meeting, quickly disintegrating Vasily Belokurov of the University of Cambridge and the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the New York-based Flatiron Institute stated that the collision had "shredded the dwarf, leaving his stars to move very far back "(19659003). Radial orbits "taking them" very close to the center of our galaxy. This is a telltale sign that the dwarf galaxy has entered a truly eccentric orbit and that its fate has been sealed. "

The collision is described in articles published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society The Letters of the Astrophysical Journal and arXiv.org.Studying the Gaia Data, which shows the positions and the trajectories of a large number of stars with unprecedented accuracy, Wyn Evans of Cambridge said that "the shape of the sausage jumped to our heart."

thrown into very radial orbits He said, "These sausage stars are what's left of the last major melting of the Milky Way."

Collisions with smaller galaxies continued after, but the sausage was much more mbadive – 10 billion times the mbad of the Sun when its gas, dust, stars and dark matter are included.When it crashed into the Milky Way, the disk of the largest galaxy was probably inflated or may be fractured with impactor debris scattered around inland areas, reshaping the galactic bulge and stellar halo observed today.

researchers, showing sausage stars entering extended orbits similar to those seen in the Gaia data. Simulations show that orbits are increasingly elongated in the Milky Way's growth disk that swells and thickens after collision

"While there have been many dwarf satellites falling down on the Milky Way, Sergey Koposov of Carnegie Mellon University

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