Small Snack for Milky Way: Astrophysicists Find New Remnants of Neighboring Galaxy in Our Own

www.sciencedaily.com...

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2011) — An international team of astronomers led by Mary Williams from the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) has discovered a new stream of stars in our Milky Way: the "Aquarius Stream," named after the constellation of Aquarius. The stream of stars is a remnant of a smaller galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood, which has been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way about 700 million years ago. The discovery is a result of the measurement of the velocities of 250,000 stars with the RAVE Survey based at the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia.

RAVE is planned to measure the characteristics of up to a million of stars of our Milky Way until 2012.

Only until 2012? Something for the conspiracy theorists. Cool none the less.