It’s not a rare occurrence for galaxies or even stars to consume its neighbors or merge with them. As astronomical bodies orbit around or drift in space, they come in contact with other bodies and sometimes, the one with a larger mass and gravitational pull will simply absorb the other. In fact, our own galaxy has had a history of doing that.
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Ten billion years ago, the Milky Way encountered another galaxy in the vast emptiness of space, and consumed it. Dubbed Gaia-Enceladus by astronomers, this stranger was roughly one-quarter the Milky Way’s size, and it forever changed the makeup and shape of our home galaxy.
(Image credit: Koppelman, Villalobos and Helmi/NASA/ESA/Hubble)
Source: neatorama