The Global Dynamical Atlas of the Milky Way mergers

The video illustrates the location of globular clusters, stellar streams and galaxy mergers as extracted from GAIA EDR3 data. The analysis led to identifying 7 "merging galaxies" of the Milky Way - those small "foreign" galaxies that sequentially merged into the Milky Way during its long history of 12 billion years and formed the vast stellar halo. These mergers include 5 previously known groups (i.e., "Sagittarius", "Cetus", "Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus", "LMS-1/Wukong," "Arjuna/Sequoia/I’itoi") and two discoveries ("Pontus" and "Candidate").
These new results explain the genesis of our Galaxy by revealing the ‘family tree’ of the Milky Way.
The study was led by Khyati Malhan from MPIA and published in:
"The Global Dynamical Atlas of the Milky Way mergers: Constraints from Gaia EDR3 based orbits of globular clusters, stellar streams and satellite galaxies", Khyati Malhan et al., Astrophysical Journal 926, 2 (2022)
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac4d2a
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2202.07660
MPIA press release: www.mpia.de/5830900/news_publ...
Credits: Thomas Müller (HdA/MPIA), Khyati Malhan

[@ClausAgerskov]

1:07 Impressive. I have just drawed sketches of M13 and M92 so was just looking up information of these two globular clusters to discover they are a part of the just discovered Pontus.