“The collision with Kraken must have been the most significant merger the Milky Way ever experienced,” said astrophysicist Diederik Kruijssen at the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg (ZAH), about artificial intelligence analysis of ancient globular clusters almost as old as the universe itself orbiting the Milky Way that revealed a stunning picture of successive mergers with neighboring galaxies creating what is, in effect, a galactic “family tree”.
“Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones,” says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Astronomers, underscoring Tyson’s observation, unveiled a surprisingly unchaotic, extremely distant, and therefore very young galaxy that looks much like our Milky Way Galaxy minus the spiral arms but with a rotating disc and a bulge, with a large group of stars packed tightly around the galactic center. This is the first time a bulge has been seen this early in the history of the Universe.
“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us,” says physicist, Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity.
In 2018, an international team of astronomers proposed that around 8 billion to 10 billion years ago an unknown massive dwarf galaxy dubbed the “Sausage” –with a total mass in gas, stars and dark matter more than 10 billion times our sun– crashed head-on into our Milky Way galaxy, ripping the dwarf to shreds, leaving its stars moving in long, narrow needle-like radial orbits. This defining event in the early history of the Milky Way reshaped the structure of our galaxy into its warped, twisted shape shown above, with the Sausage debris scattered around the inner parts of the Milky Way, creating the ‘bulge’ at the galaxy’s center and the surrounding ‘stellar halo.’
This past February, four distinguished astrophysicists —Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf— suggested in new research that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.
