Astronomers find strong evidence for a massive merger 1.8 billion years earlier than the oldest previously known significant merger.
The early universe was a chaotic place, crowded with young galaxies that smashed together and agglomerated into larger and larger galaxies over billions of years. Our own Milky Way experienced such collisions, but the details are difficult to tease out since they occurred so long ago. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have now extended our knowledge of the Milky Way’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than ever before, finding strong evidence that it merged with another galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution.
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