The Milky Way Is Considered A Cannibal Galaxy, What Causes It?
At the end of last year, NASA announced that it had discovered a cannibal galaxy named WISE J224607.55-0526634.9. It is said that these galaxies swallow similar galaxies because they require so much energy to produce light.
Interestingly, the latest findings show that the Milky Way Galaxy with Earth in it has the same behavior, which is cannibalism. This was revealed by the research team from the Instituto de Astrophyica de Canarias (IAC), Tenerife, Spain.
According to the results of research conducted, the so-called Milky Way has swallowed a galaxy with a mass of 25% of its total size. The event is said to have occurred 10 billion years ago, as Dafunda Tekno quoted from Phys.
To prove it, they used an extraterrestrial telescope called Gaia, owned by the European Space Agency (ESA). The tool can be used to obtain the size, position, brightness, and distance of about 1 million to stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is 6,500 light-years from the Sun.
Previously, the Milky Way Galaxy was thought to consist of two separate but related groups of stars. The union of the two star groups is still a mystery. It could be that the theory carried out by the research team from IAC is the answer.
Interestingly, there is the potential for the Milky Way to merge with other galaxies, such as Andromeda within 4.5 billion years from now.