How an ancient collision with another galaxy transformed the Milky Way
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered evidence that our galaxy experienced a significant collision and merger with a dwarf galaxy 11.8 billion years ago. Mergers between galaxies are one of the main ways in which galaxies can grow. However, while we can witness mergers taking place in other galaxies, figuring out our Milky Way galaxy's history requires painstaking detective work. Even now, the story is only partly known. "Our home is the Milky Way galaxy, but we do not know how our house was built," Davide Massari of the Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna in Italy said in a statement . Massari is lead author of a paper describing the discovery of an ancient galactic merger. "In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from: a dwarf galaxy that we call LKH." LKH stands for Low-energy–Kraken–Heracles, which is an obtus...