Our planet has had a bit of a tumultuous past, at some point during its 4-and-a-half billion year history colliding with another planet sized object. Now experts say that wasn’t the only time the Earth was around for a massive collision, however the one they’re talking about is galactic in proportion.
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00:00Our planet has had a bit of a tumultuous past.
00:06At some point during its four and a half billion year history, colliding with another planet
00:10sized object, which experts say changed its composition and resulted in the moon coalescing
00:15into existence.
00:17Now experts say that wasn't the only time the earth was around for a massive collision.
00:20However, the one they're talking about is galactic in proportion.
00:24Previously experts believed the Milky Way's last big galactic collision happened between
00:288 and 11 billion years ago.
00:30However, new data suggests it could have been much earlier, around 3 billion years ago,
00:35which anyone doing the math will know that's within the earth's lifetime.
00:38Experts say that every time a galaxy collides with another, it leaves behind wrinkles, or
00:42different kinds of galactic morphologies.
00:44The wrinkles are like waves moving through clusters of stars.
00:47However, they say our galaxy is doing the opposite, getting less wrinkly, something
00:51they equate to a cosmic Benjamin Button, with the researchers saying about it,
00:55By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way
00:59experienced its last big crash, and it turns out this happened billions of years later
01:03than we thought.
01:04Adding that a dwarf galaxy likely rammed into the Milky Way just 2.7 billion years ago,
01:09an event which has now been named the Virgo Radial Merger.