The galaxy next door to our warped and twisted Milky Way is, officially, a monster. Astronomers studying the Andromeda galaxy have discovered the huge spiral galaxy has quite the cannibalistic past. On two separate occasions over the last 10 billion years, Andromeda has gobbled up smaller galaxies but the way in which it devoured them has astronomers puzzled. ”We’ve known for about 10 to 15 years that Andromeda has had a much more violent past, in terms of swallowing smaller galaxies, than the Milky Way has,” says Dougal Mackey, a researcher at Australian National University and first author on the new study.The research, conducted by Mackey and an international team of collaborators, was published in the journal Nature on Oct. 2 and reconstructs the history of the Andromeda galaxy in greater detail than ever before. After examining 77 globular clusters — dense knots of around a million stars each — orbiting Andromeda and measuring their velocities, the team stumbled upon something pretty surprising. The best explanation for their data suggests Andromeda cannibalized a galaxy (or multiple galaxies) at least twice over the last 10 billion years. One of these feeding frenzies occurred recently, but the other is much more ancient. Rather than gradually… Read full this story
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