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Find traces of the cosmic collision that occurred 10 billion years ago between Via Lattea and the giant galaxy Gaia-Enceladus: the stars of this galaxy still shine in the halo of our galaxy. The details are illustrated in the study published in the journal Nature by the group of the Dutch University of Groningen, coordinated by astronomer Amina Helmi.
The authors searched for the "fossil remains" of Gaia-Enceladus in the Milky Way by studying the chemical composition, position and trajectory of stars in the galactic halo, in order to reconstruct its formation and evolution.
Galaxies such as the Milky Way, according to current theories, are actually the result of collisions with other celestial objects, which have shaped their shape and size. Like the Enceladus galaxy, named after the giant of Greek mythology born of the union between the goddess of the land Gaia and the sky god Uranus.
To find the traces of this very old collision, the Helmi group badyzed the data of the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), whose same astronomer is among the leaders and who published in April the catalog the more detailed of the stars of our galaxy, with more than 1.7 billion leaden stars.
The badysis shows that the footprint of many halo stars differs from those of the Milky Way. "We did not expect," says Helmi, "most of the stars in the Milky Way halo have an origin related to the collision with Gaia-Enceladus." These stars – he concluded – are the detritus of the collision that occurred. there are billions of years ".
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