NASA Discovers Eerie Remains Of A Galaxy The Milky Way Devoured

by Aaron Leong — Tuesday, May 26, 2026, 10:22 AM EDT

Astronomers have discovered remnants of a galaxy that the Milky Way gobbled up roughly 10 billion years ago, consisting of "metal-poor" stars consistent with dwarf galaxies.

Space is mind-bogglingly vast. To understand its scale, consider that light travels at 186,282 miles per second. At that speed, light can circle Earth seven and a half times in a single second. Yet, even when moving that fast, it takes a beam of light 100,000 years to travel from one side of our Milky Way galaxy to the other.

Our solar system is just a tiny speck within this collection of several hundred billion stars. This sprawling galactic disc is constantly moving, rotating, and growing, and for a long time, scientists have tried to piece together exactly how it evolved into the giant structure we live in today.

A fresh discovery has provided a vital clue to that ancient puzzle, revealing that our galaxy expanded by consuming its neighbors. A team of NASA astronomers has identified a cluster of stars called "very metal-poor" hidden right in plain sight near the galactic plane, approximately 7,000 light-years from our solar system. Metal-poor stars means they contain almost no chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

eso0932a — *A panorama of the Milky Way. (Credit: ESO/S. Brunier)*

By analyzing 20 of these ancient stars using high-resolution spectroscopy with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the researchers discovered that they share a nearly identical chemical fingerprint, indicating they were all born in the same place. However, their movements are incredibly chaotic: 11 of the stars rotate in the same direction as the Milky Way, while nine orbit in the complete opposite direction. This bizarre orbital mixing could only happen if a smaller system collapsed into our galaxy during its infancy, when the Milky Way's gravitational pull was much weaker and more turbulent.

The surviving stars of this long-lost ancient dwarf galaxy, deemed Loki, show traces of massive supernova explosions but lack the hallmarks of white dwarf detonations. Since white dwarfs take billions of years to form and die, this absence reveals that Loki was a short-lived system, entirely devoured and shredded by the infant Milky Way about 10 billion years ago.

Main photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)