See what the Milky Way looked like billions of years ago, shortly after its birth – video

The early universe , 13 billion years ago , was a cosmic construction site in full effervescence. Stars were born at a dizzying rate, giving rise to the first dwarf galaxies, destined to merge and create the colossal galaxies that populate the cosmos today , including our Milky Way . But until recently, the details of this tumultuous formation remained shrouded in mystery. Thanks to the precise measurements of the Gaia space telescope , which has precisely mapped the position , brightness and distance of over a million stars in our galaxy, a team of astronomers has finally lifted a corner of the veil on this fascinating cosmic story. The results of this research, published in 2019 in the prestigious journal Nature Astronomy , shed new light on the early stages of formation of the Milky Way:

This is what the Milky Way looked like at the beginning of its very long history:

Previous studies had already revealed that the halo of our galaxy, the sort of luminous halo that surrounds the stellar disk, was composed of two distinct stellar populations: one younger and rich in heavy elements, and another older and poor in metals. Astronomers had identified the first population as the remains of a dwarf galaxy , called Gaia-Enceladus , that had collided with our primordial galaxy. However, the origin of the second population and the timing of this collision remained unclear. The new analyses of Gaia data have allowed us to reconstruct a more complete picture of the event. About 13 billion years ago, two distinct stellar systems began to form the first stars: on one side, a dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, and on the other, a much more massive and metal-rich system, destined to become the progenitor of our Milky Way. About 10 billion years ago , these two systems collided in a violent collision. The impact was so violent that it threw the stars of both galaxies into chaotic orbits, giving rise to the Milky Way ‘s halo . Over the next eons, our galaxy continued to grow through intense episodes of star formation, until about 6 billion years ago , when the residual gas settled into a thin disk, giving rise to the disk-like structure that characterizes spiral galaxies like our own. This discovery represents a fundamental step in understanding the formation of galaxies and offers us a clearer view of the early stages of the evolution of our universe. Link to the video:

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