'Space archaeology' reveals first dynamic history of a giant spiral galaxy

A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have for the first time used galactic archaeology, the study of detailed chemical fingerprints in deep space, to trace the history of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, demonstrates a new way to reconstruct the evolution of distant galaxies, and opens up a new field of astronomy, called "extragalactic archaeology."