By tracking the motions of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Gaia space telescope has been unraveling the history of the Milky Way — and the spacecraft's latest findings disentangle that story in a more literal way than ever before.
Gaia has discovered two ancient streams of stars that appear to have woven together over 12 billion years ago, which less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The streams of stars are so old that they likely formed before even the spiral arms or extended disk of the Milky Way began to take shape.
