“We get wrinklier as we age, but our work reveals that the opposite is true for the Milky Way. It’s a sort of cosmic Benjamin Button, getting less wrinkly over time,” said Donlon, lead author of the new Gaia study, which also served as his doctoral thesis at Rensselaer. “By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way experienced its last big crash – and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.”
"The collision is thought to have resulted in a large number of stars with unusual orbits. Previously, scientists dated it at between eight and 11 billion years ago in a collision called the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) merger. Rather, Newberg and Donlon’s findings indicate that the stars may have resulted from the Virgo Radial Merger, which crashed through the center of the Milky Way less than three billion years ago."
Rensselaer Researchers Upend Theory About the Formation of the Milky Way Galaxy | News
"The collision is thought to have resulted in a large number of stars with unusual orbits. Previously, scientists dated it at between eight and 11 billion years ago in a collision called the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) merger. Rather, Newberg and Donlon’s findings indicate that the stars may have resulted from the Virgo Radial Merger, which crashed through the center of the Milky Way less than three billion years ago."
Rensselaer Researchers Upend Theory About the Formation of the Milky Way Galaxy | News
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