New Evidence of How and When the Milky Way Came Together
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
New evidence of how and when the Milky Way came together:
New research provides the best evidence to date into the timing of how our early Milky Way came together, including the merger with a key satellite galaxy.
Using relatively new methods in astronomy, the researchers were able to identify the most precise ages currently possible for a sample of about a hundred red giant stars in the galaxy.
With this and other data, the researchers were able to show what was happening when the Milky Way merged with an orbiting satellite galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, about 10 billion years ago.
Journal Reference:
Josefina Montalban, J. Ted Mackereth, Andrea Miglio, et al. Chronologically dating the early assembly of the Milky Way, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01347-7)
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