Milky Way still in thrall of a 900 million-year-old cosmic collision
The
Milky
Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that took
place sometime in the past 300-900 million years and set millions of stars
moving like ripples
on a pond, scientists say.
The
European Space Agency (ESA)'s star mapping mission, Gaia, discovered the
pattern of movement in stars in the Milky Way disc -- one of the major
components of our galaxy.
The
pattern was revealed because Gaia not only accurately measures the positions of
more than a billion stars but also precisely measures their velocities on the
plane of the sky.
For
a subset of a few million stars, Gaia provided an estimate of the full
three-dimensional velocities, allowing a study of stellar motion using the
combination of position and velocity, which is known as 'phase space'. Read
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