Scientific Colloquium
November 7, 2003
The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is
currently being shredded by the Milky Way's gravity, and tossing its
stars across the Galaxy. Recent detection of a "Ring of Stars"
around the Galaxy suggests there might be a second such galaxy in the
process of being disbursed. These mergers "caught in the act"
help teach us how galaxies like our galaxy, and by implication all
galaxies, form. The tidal debris will be used to trace the dark
matter in the Milky Way, and may even affect the experiments which are
attempting to directly detect dark matter here on Earth. Whatever you
learned about the structure of the Milky Way in school, well, it's
probably wrong.