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The Milky Way Started Eating Other Galaxies Billions of Years Earlier Than We Thought, New Study Says

Galaxies gotta eat too.

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Our galactic home, the Milky Way galaxy, was a hungry fella several eons ago. Scientists observing clusters of stars hanging out near the Milky Way’s center found evidence suggesting that our galaxy once collided with and devoured a smaller galaxy about 11.8 billion years ago. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy and detailed on NASA’s website, push the known history of the Milky Way’s galactic gluttony back roughly 1.8 billion years.

The devoured dwarf galaxy is named Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH. It got eaten alive yet is still named after two legendary fearsome mythological figures. It contained stars that were roughly 500 million times the mass of our own Sun and represented a huge chunk of the young........

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