Archived AstroTours
The Gaia space telescope reveals the galaxy collision that shaped the Milky Way
By James Lane (he/him) on 11 January, 2024The Milky Way galaxy, our home, is one of billions of galaxies scattered throughout the Universe. A fundamental quest in astrophysics is to determine how these galaxies, and our Milky Way in particular, have formed and evolved over cosmic time. The Gaia Space Telescope measures the motions of individual stars in the Milky Way, data which is crucial for establishing its past and present nature. One of the most surprising discoveries of this new era of data is that the Milky Way collided with another galaxy nearly 10 billion years ago. In this talk I will explain how astronomers work like archaeologists, using remnants of this collision that we can detect today using data from the Gaia Space Telescope, to piece together the circumstances of this collision between two young galaxies which established our Milky Way.
About James Lane (he/him)
James is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. James studies our Milky Way galaxy using data from the Gaia Space Telescope. James is from Victoria, BC, where he got his undergraduate degree from the University of Victoria. In his spare time James enjoys cycling, reading about history, and hiking.