Milky Way gobbled up a galaxy one quarter of its mass 10 billion years ago in a "violent collision" that didn't fully settle for eons, astronomers said in new research published Monday. Previous studies had suggested that our home galaxy was composed of two separate sets of stars, but the precise chronology of the galactic merge remained elusive. Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) used the Gaia space telescope to take exact measurements of the position, brightness and distance of around one million stars in the Milky Way within 6,500 light years of the Sun.
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