Posted on 08/30/2024 6:06:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
New research indicates that the most recent major collision in our galaxy occurred billions of years later than previously believed.
Using data from the Gaia spacecraft, researchers found that the Milky Way's last major galactic collision happened less than three billion years ago, not the eight to 11 billion years previously thought...
Newberg, a renowned astrophysicist and Milky Way expert, and Donlon focused on the so-called "wrinkles" in our galaxy, which are formed when other galaxies collide with the Milky Way...
By comparing their observations of the wrinkles with cosmological simulations, the team was able to determine that our last significant collision with another galaxy did not, in fact, occur between eight and 11 billion years ago, as previously believed...
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
On the left the halo appears messy and 'wrinkly', a sign that a merger has occurred relatively recently. On the right it appears smooth and uniform, a sign that a merger has instead occurred in the ancient past.Credit: Halo stars: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, T Donlon et al. 2024; Background Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar; LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard License
The question to ask is :WHY did they think the collision occured 11 billion years ago? What info did they use to come up with that conclusion? Are they missing more information? Is their simulation correct since there may be other information they haven’t discovered yet?
As I understand it, "Gaia" is a the primordial goddess, mother of all -- female.
So this "Gaia -- Sausage -- Enchilada" merger sounds like she's either eating Mexican food, or else having a good old time with the sausage, in other words some celestial hanky panky resulting in the invention of the enchilada.
What gives here?
What’s that saying about people who like sausage should not watch it being made?
Friday night on Free Republic! Snicker, snicker...
Wrinkled….smooth…..so the Universe got a cosmic facelift?
Gay sausage enchilada. Sounds like a Seth Rogan/Neil Patrick Harris movie title.
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