The Milky Way is a cosmic cannibal. Stars reveal one of its meals
CNN • • general
Key Points:
- Astronomers have identified a cluster of metal-poor stars near the Milky Way’s disk that may be remnants of an ancient dwarf galaxy, dubbed Loki, which the Milky Way consumed about 10 billion years ago.
- These stars, lacking heavy elements and sharing similar chemical compositions, suggest they originated from the same dwarf galaxy, challenging previous assumptions about the galaxy’s formation history.
- The discovery was made using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope and spectrograph observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, revealing stars in both prograde and retrograde orbits.
- If confirmed, the Loki merger event could represent a major, previously overlooked building block in the Milky Way’s evolution, comparable in scale to the well-known Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger.
- Scientists emphasize that further studies and larger datasets are needed to verify Loki’s existence and fully understand its impact on the Milky Way’s growth and structure.