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An ancient galaxy appears to be buried inside the Milky Way, new research suggests.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right: a galaxy inside a galaxy. The lost realm, which the astronomers have dubbed \u201cLoki\u201d after the Norse trickster god, was consumed by our galaxy billions of years ago as it was growing in size, they report in a new study<\/a> published in the journal the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.\u00a0<\/p>\n Loki, if its existence is borne out, would have been a dwarf galaxy<\/a>. These contain no more than a few billion stars \u2014 which is peanuts compared to the hundreds of billions that fully-fledged galaxies like our own contain \u2014 and often orbit a larger galaxy. Astronomers are interesting in the formation of dwarf galaxies, which tend to have irregular shapes. Are they smashed together during the gravitational interactions that form a larger one, or brought together by the intervention of invisible dark matter?<\/p>\n Moreover, dwarf galaxies tend to be made of stars that are \u201cmetal-poor,\u201d similar to the first stars that first formed in the universe, before later generations fused heavier elements. It was this facet that the astronomers used to divine the presence of the hidden relic.<\/p>\n In the study, they analyzed a group of 20 metal-poor stars in the Milky Way\u2019s galactic plane, the flat disc-shaped region along which most of its stars reside. When they compared their chemical composition to objects in the galaxy\u2019s outskirts, including stars and other dwarf galaxies, they found the chemical traces of numerous cosmic explosions that let off heavy elements, including supernovas and neutron star mergers.<\/p>\n