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In the papers published with the new research, Helmi stated that the chemical signature of many inverse stars was clearly different from the "native" stars of the Milky Way.
"And they form a fairly homogeneous group, which indicates that they share a common origin," she said. "The youngest stars of Gaia-Enceladus are actually younger than the stars of the Milky Way in the area of the thick disc. This means that the progenitor of this thick disc was already present at the fusion, and Gaia-Enceladus, because of its large size, shook and inflated it. "
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Size is a delicate concept when one works at the galactic scale, but the Helmi team estimates that Gaia-Enceladus, the missing galaxy, was slightly more massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMG ), a dwarf galaxy with a total solar mass of about 1%. of the Milky Way. (By the way, the Milky Way is also eating the SMG slowly.)
One last interesting note: when Helmi finally gathered all the data from the Gaia information snapshot, she discovered that the numbers seemed terribly familiar. They reminded Helmi of simulations made by a former doctoral student. student more than ten years ago. The student's simulations on the fusion of a large disk-shaped galaxy with the young Milky Way gave results fully consistent with Gaia's data.
"It was amazing to watch Gaia's new data," said Helmi, "and to realize that I had already seen it before."
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