{"id":176,"date":"2018-11-05T09:42:15","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T09:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/?p=176"},"modified":"2018-11-05T09:43:46","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T09:43:46","slug":"the-milky-way-swallows-a-smaller-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/the-milky-way-swallows-a-smaller-galaxy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Milky Way Swallows a Smaller Galaxy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>A new study conducted by the\u00a0University of Groningen suggests that the Milky Way devoured a much smaller galaxy around 10 billion years ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Amina Helmi, and astronomer at the university says: \u201cThis is a major event in the history of the galaxy. We\u2019re really starting to probe the ancestors of the Milky Way.\u201d The team reported in nature magazine that they observed a large group of starts roughly 33,000 light years away from the sun. They found that the starts were moving backwards compared to our sun and the rest of the galaxy, which made them think something was up. They began to wonder why they were rotating around the galactic centre backwards.\u00a0\u201cThat was the first hint,\u201d Helmi says. \u201cWhen stars move the opposite way, that already tells you that they basically didn\u2019t form in the same place as the majority of the stars in our galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The team then proceeded to look up the stars in a catalogue from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, which identifies stars ages and chemical compositions by analysing spectrum&#8217;s of light that they emit. They found that the stars in question were made up of fewer heavier elements compared to our Sun and other stars in our galaxy.\u00a0This suggests that they formed earlier in the history of the universe, before enough time passed for massive stars and supernovas to spread the heavier elements around the galaxy.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That chemistry clinched it,&#8221; Helmi says. \u201cIt was just so clean. You immediately knew these stars really formed elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Comparing the observations with computer simulations, Helmi\u2019s team concluded that the Milky Way collided with a smaller galaxy around\u00a010 billion years ago, and it was 20 to 25 percent the size of the Milky Way at the time. They estimated that the smaller galaxy roughly contained the equivalent of 600 million stars the mass of the sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study conducted by the\u00a0University of Groningen suggests that the Milky Way devoured a much smaller galaxy around 10 billion years ago. Amina Helmi, and astronomer at the university says: \u201cThis is a major event in the history of the galaxy. We\u2019re really starting to probe the ancestors of the Milky Way.\u201d The team&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[39,38,18,20],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-space","tag-galaxy","tag-milky-way","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}