General · 21 July 2026
Milky Way's flip: A 10-billion-year-old dwarf galaxy collision
Photo by Ndumiso Mvelase on Pexels
Durham University astronomers used supercomputer simulations to show a head-on collision with the Gaia Sausage likely turned our galaxy’s disc by more than 90 degrees. They linked the event to the unusually slow rotation of stars in the Milky Way’s halo and said the flip took several hundred million years. Researchers present the findings this week at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham.
Reported by The Guardian · How we write briefs