Tech
Scientists find mystery galaxy related to Milky Way
Scientists have found a mysterious galaxy, twinned with our own, thought to have been shredded apart.
Even though the galaxy has been mostly destroyed, it left behind an intriguing trail of evidence.
The universe is haunted by bits left behind from when it was around, such as an almost invisible halo of stars larger than the Andromeda galaxy itself and an elusive stream of stars, the researchers write.
The galaxy was ripped to shreds by Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, the new paper claims. But it was once the third-largest galaxy in our local area.
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Scientists have long known that the halo of stars contained the remnants of cannibalized galaxies. But they feared that there were so many smaller galaxies contained within that it would be impossible to learn about any specific one.
New computer simulations allowed them to find that while Andromeda had eaten many galaxies, many of the stars found in the halo actually came from one larger shredded galaxy.
“It was a ‘eureka’ moment. We realized we could use this information of Andromeda’s outer stellar halo to infer the properties of the largest of these shredded galaxies,” said lead author Richard D’Souza, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan.
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