Editor's Note: Jessica Shugart is a science communication
graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Billions of years after going on a cannibalistic binge, our own
Milky Way galaxy has been implicated by the stale crumbs it left
behind. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
used Hubble Space Telescope data to spot the crumbs - ancient
stars thought to be remnants of a dwarf galaxy engulfed by our
hungry Milky Way when it was still young. The finding, to be
published in the upcoming issue of "The Astrophysical Journal,"
supports the hypothesis that the Milky Way grew by pulling in
smaller galaxies and claiming them as its own. The researchers
found the stars while looking at data from the Andromeda galaxy
- the next big thing the Milky Way is destined to overtake. In
about 4.5 billion years, the two are set to meet up and form an
elliptical galaxy (Milkomeda?). In order for astronomers to
focus on stars in Andromeda, they had to cancel out the annoying
stars that orbited