Skip to main content

Hubble Solves Merger Mystery From Milky Way’s Early Years

View Filtered Press Releases View All Press Releases
August 17, 2026 11:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2026-015
An illustration of two galaxies in the midst of a collision against a dark, star-filled background. The collision takes up the middle third of the illustration. On the right, a larger galaxy is viewed at an angle from 11 o’clock to 4 o’clock, with a white-yellow core surrounded by mottled brown dust lanes and faint bluish spiral arms. To the left, a smaller, bright blue-white galaxy is stretched into a curved, hook-like shape as gravity distorts it. A broad, glowing bridge of pale blue gas and stars extends off the galaxy at the left, while wispy streams extend above and below the larger galaxy at the right. The words “Artist’s Concept” appear in the lower left corner.

Summary

Astronomers find strong evidence for a massive merger 1.8 billion years earlier than the oldest previously known significant merger.

The early universe was a chaotic place, crowded with young galaxies that smashed together and agglomerated into larger and larger galaxies over billions of years. Our own Milky Way experienced such collisions, but the details are difficult to tease out since they occurred so long ago. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have now extended our knowledge of the Milky Way’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than ever before, finding strong evidence that it merged with another galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution.

Full Article

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its current size in part by consuming smaller galaxies. Now, new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution. This finding extends our knowledge of our galaxy’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than before. The results published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. The Milky Way today is a massive spiral galaxy home to hundreds of billions of stars. However, our galaxy wasn’t always so large; it has ...

Read More on NASA.gov

Callout: Full Press Release

Visit NASA Science to view the full news release including article text and associated Hubble imagery, graphics, scientific visualizations, videos, captions, text descriptions, and other information.

News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-26555. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

End callout
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google

Contact our News Team 

Contact our Outreach Office