Milky Way’s peripheral stars may come from alien galaxies

The most distant known stars in our galaxy are about 300,000 light-years from Earth. According to scientistsów of Harvard, at least half of them may come from an alien galaxy.

Galaxy, whichóra has lost its stars to the Milky Way is the SagDEG (Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy) – Dwarf elliptical galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius. Experts say that over millions of years SagDEG has circled the Milky Way several times. Each approach to the Milky Way caused it to be stretched by the gravity of our galaxy, resulting in the tearing of SagDEG. In this wayób several stars were able to move from SagDEG to the Milky Way.

The study’s author, Marion Dierickx of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used a computer model in her research, which allowedóru conducted a simulation of the path followed by theóSagDEG’s cruise has been moving for the past eight billionóin years. Data from the model suggest that at the beginning of the period studied, this galaxy had a mass of one percent of the mass of the Milky Way. However, during their podróSagDEG gyro has lost significant weight and about 1/3 of its stars.

According to the computer model, five of the 11 most distant stars in the Milky Way known to us have characteristics that która corresponds to stars previously found in SagDEG. The other six stars are unlikely to come from this dwarf galaxy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t „stolen” another galaxy.