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?
Wrinkled….smooth…..so the Universe got a cosmic facelift?
