The Milky Way may have flipped upside-down.
New research suggests our galaxy once spun itself into a dramatic new orientation—tilting its entire disc by more than 90 degrees—helping solve a long-standing cosmic puzzle about its structure.
Using powerful supercomputer simulations of galaxies like our own, astronomers at Durham University discovered that those with slowly rotating stellar haloes are far more likely to have undergone a major “disc flip.” In these cosmic somersaults, the galaxy’s flat disc of stars and gas reorients itself almost completely, rewriting its place in the universe.
Credit: Auriga Project and Thomas Tomlinson