How It Works

Newfound collision may be the biggest in Milky Way history

The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars, but it didn’t come by them all honestly. At least a dozen times over the last 12 billion years, the Milky Way collided with a neighbouring galaxy and devoured it, swallowing up that neighbour's stars and mixing them into an ever-growing stew of pilfered suns.

With each new galactic merger, the shape, size and

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