Milky Way absorbed ancient galaxy
Recent research has found that the Milky Way ingested a dwarf galaxy approximately 11.8 billion years ago, marking the oldest known merger in its history. This event occurred when the universe was less than 15% of its current age. It illustrates how the large galaxy grew through tearing apart and merging with smaller galaxies, with the dwarf galaxy containing stars totaling up to 500 million times the mass of the Sun—about a quarter of the size of the Milky Way at that time. The researchers used the Hubble and Gaia telescopes to study hundreds of thousands of stars in star clusters across a span of 20,000 light-years, assessing their ages and chemical compositions. Their findings confirm that this merger was one of the most significant events in the galaxy’s evolution over the ages.
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