Milky Way's Ancient Meal: Loki's Remains Hint at a Dwarf Galaxy It Devoured
Astronomers using Gaia data have identified 20 metal-poor stars near the Milky Way's disk whose shared chemistry and orbital patterns suggest they originated in a now-destroyed dwarf galaxy nicknamed Loki. If confirmed, Loki would be a major building block in the Milky Way's history, accreted about 10 billion years ago, with both prograde and retrograde orbits indicating a complex merger that could revise our picture of the Galaxy’s growth alongside events like Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.