Gaia detects a shake in the Milky Way

2018-09-20 00:00:00

Researchers of the UB and the University of Groningen lead one of the first big discoveries from the Gaia Mission, published in Nature. Position and movement data of more than 6 million stars show substructures that were never seen, originated by an impact that occurred more than 300 million years ago.

The impact can be the gravitational slowdown caused by the last passage of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way disk.
 

---

Links

Video: https://youtu.be/ce-8E8ksOsY
Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0510-7
More info: http://icc.ub.edu/news/473
Additional material: https://sites.google.com/fqa.ub.edu/tantoja/research/a-young-and-perturbed-milky-way-disk