Research reveals a shocking discovery about the history of our universe: the Milky Way Galaxy's last major collision occurred billions of years later than previously thought.
Research reveals a shocking discovery about the history of our universe: the Milky Way Galaxy's last major collision occurred billions of years later than previously thought.
"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," said Donlon, lead author of the new Gaia study, which also served as his doctoral thesis at Rensselaer."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.
The collision is thought to have resulted in a large number of stars with unusual orbits. Previously, scientists dated it at between eight and 11 billion years ago in a collision called the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger. Rather, Newberg and Donlon's findings indicate that the stars may have resulted from the Virgo Radial Merger, which crashed through the center of the Milky Way less than three billion years ago.
Newberg and Donlon were joined in research by Robyn Sanderson, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania and Flatiron Institute; Emily Bregou, Ph.D., Arpit Arora, Ph.D., and Nondh Panithanpaisal, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania; and Danny Horta, Ph.D., of the Flatiron Institute and the Astrophysics Research Institute.
Astronomy Astrophysics Stars Cosmology Space Station Space Probes Space Telescopes
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