By employing cutting-edge methods by which to derive these latest calculations and theories of how our galaxy merged with a satellite galaxy, scientists from Ohio State University and the University of Birmingham were able to pin down a better timeline by sampling nearly one hundred red giant stars in the Milky Way.
By pairing this up with previously documented research, the team was eager to demonstrate the events that occurred when our galaxy married an orbiting galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus some 10 billion years ago.
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“Our evidence suggests that when the merger occurred, the Milky Way had already formed a large population of its own stars,” said Fiorenzo Vincenzo, co-author of the study and a fellow in The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.