The family tree of the Milky Way. The mergers that gave us the galaxy we see today

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Galaxies build themselves up slowly over time by cannibalizing their neighbors. Using an advanced suite of computer simulations, researchers have now traced back the evolutionary history of our own Milky Way.


Our galaxy, the Milky Way, currently hosts hundreds of billions of stars, and is pretty respectably sized for the kind of galaxy it is. But it hasn’t always been this big – nor has any other galaxy in the present-day universe. Galaxies grow slowly over the course of billions of years, mostly by eagerly merging with each other.


The Milky Way participated in this violent upbringing, consuming any smaller galaxy that came wandering by in the course of its 10-billion-year-plus history.



And it ate a lot.

The family tree of the Milky Way. The mergers that gave us the galaxy we see today - Universe Today

Galaxies build themselves up slowly over time by cannibalizing their neighbors. Using an advanced suite of computer simulations, researchers have now traced back the evolutionary history of our own Milky Way. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, currently hosts hundreds of billions of stars, and is pretty...

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