Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is one of the six main elements that make up the human body and an essential element for life as we know it. Unlike hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and calcium, phosphorus is rare. It is even more scarce in the rest of the Solar System. The source of its arrival on early Earth has long been up to debate.
Gaia Mission scientists called it “hiding in plain sight” referring to their major breakthrough in unraveling the formation history of the Milky Way when our galaxy merged with another galaxy early in its life, littering evidence across the sky all around us. The merger — a collision, actually — reports astronomers at Yale University, happened 11.5 billion years ago when a small galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus slammed into what then existed of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, which is about 13.5 billion years old.
“This is a puny cluster of stars—less than a few thousand in total—but it has big implications beyond its local area of the Milky Way,” says primary discoverer Adrian Price-Whelan, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics about an unexpected cluster of young stars of extragalactic origin in the outskirts the Milky Way’s vast halo –a region that harbors the galaxy’s oldest stars.
Today’s “Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of the Milky Way and the Universe beyond.
On a gorgeous clear night in 1968 at the Kitt Peak Observatory in the mountains of southern Arizona, astronomer Vera Rubin discovered the existence of dark matter by closely observing the spectra of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy to determine their velocities along with her her colleague, Kent Ford, to calculate how fast the galaxy’s stars rotate around its center.
