Our Milky Way galaxy flipped upside down ten billion years ago in a cataclysmic collision with a dwarf galaxy dubbed the Gaia Sausage. This violent merger ripped apart the intruder and absorbed its stars, spinning our galactic disc into its current orientation. The discovery, made by studying slow-moving stars in the Milky Way’s halo and backed by supercomputer simulations, reveals that this ancient smash-up—occurring before our solar system even formed—shaped the galaxy’s central bulge and halo. The Gaia Sausage, though small, carried mass equivalent to ten billion suns and left behind telltale sausage-shaped orbits that confirmed its identity. While this was the galaxy’s most dramatic merger, it’s not the last—Sagittarius is currently merging with us, and the Large Magellanic Cloud is on its way, though still billions of years away.
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