The Milky Way has devoured at least six small galaxies, something astronomers have proven by seeing their remains in a new map of space that allows us to learn more about the history and formation of our galaxy.
According to a report published on the website of Nat Geo in Spanish citing a study by The Astrophysical Journalthese six small galaxies succumbed during the last 13 thousand years, victims of gravitational pull.
This group of galaxies stretched into a band called the stellar stream, which then faded millions of years into the halo that stretches from the disk to the various spiral arms of the Milky Way.
This merger also left debris from small satellite galaxies and globular clusters, but the debris serves to learn more about the Milky Way and how it has been “fed”.
a new timeline
To strengthen the discovery of the remains, a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy created a timeline that reveals how the Milky Way devoured half a dozen galaxies.
Gaia, the space probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) launched in 2019 that is responsible for making measurements to create three-dimensional maps of the Milky Way, made the observations and generated this map in space.
The study focused on 170 globular clusters, 41 stellar streams and 46 satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and after analyzing their energy, the experts classified 25 percent of the objects into six different groups, each belonging to a galaxy that merged with ours.
As fans of space research well know, the galaxies Gaia-Enceladus, Cetus, LMS/1Wukoong, Sequoia and Sagittarius merged with the Milky Way in the past, but now, the new study identified the remnants of a swallowed galaxy that had not been seen before: it was baptized Pontus.