Hovering stars spotted within the Milky Way’s halo hint at our galaxy’s gluttonous past.

Billions of years after going on a cannibalistic binge, our own Milky Way galaxy has been implicated by the stale crumbs it left behind.

Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used Hubble Space Telescope data to spot the crumbs – ancient stars thought to be remnants of a dwarf galaxy engulfed by our hungry Milky Way when it was still young.

The finding, to be published in the upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal, supports the hypothesis that the Milky Way grew by pulling in smaller galaxies and claiming them as its own.

Read the full post at  CNN Light Years.