How our Milky Way was born

13 billion years ago, the universe looked quite different. Stars formed in rapid sequence and joined to form dwarf galaxies that grew bigger through collisions with each other, in order to finally become the massive galaxies we see today. Our Milky Way was formed through a similar process.

Spanish researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have now succeeded in retracing the development of our home galaxy using data from the Gaia satellite. To do this, the astronomers compa...