Milky Way's Galactic Gobbling Leaves Star 'Crumbs'

Artist's concept of the four tails of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (orange clump on left of the image) orbiting the Milky Way.

The bright yellow circle to the right of the Milky Way's center is our sun (not to scale). We can see the Sagittarius galaxy's star tails stretching across the sky.

CREDIT: Amanda Smith, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

Our Milky Way galaxy is a messy eater, leaving streams of star "crumbs" spread across the sky after chomping its smaller neighbors, a new study reports.

Astronomers have found two such streams emanating from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, torn off by the Milky Way's huge gravitational pull.

The two newfound star tails are in the southern galactic hemisphere, and they meet up with two others previously known from Sagittarius in the northern galactic hemisphere.

"Sagittarius is like a beast with four tails," study co-author Wyn Evans, of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.