The Milky Way likely collided with a recently discovered dwarf galaxy called Antlia 2 less than a billion years ago, according to new research presented Wednesday at the 234th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The research, spearheaded by Sukanya Chakrabarti of the Rochester Institute of Technology, supports a prediction she made a decade ago about how the Milky Way picked up a unique “ripple” pattern in its outer disk. If confirmed, researchers think the discovery will make Antila 2 an ideal natural laboratory for investigating the elusive substance known as dark matter. The work has been submitted for publication to the Astrophysical Journal Letters; a preprint is currently available.
Back in 2006, researchers revealed the Milky Way has a strange set of ripples percolating through its outer gas disk. In 2009, Chakrabarti published a study that analyzed these ripples, showing a collision between a dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxy and ...
