Home Space News A lost dwarf galaxy may be hiding inside the Milky Way. NASA/JPL-Caltech Our home galaxy has a secret buried inside. A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that the Milky Way swallowed an ancient dwarf galaxy billions of years ago, and its stellar remains are still embedded within ours. Researchers have named this lost galaxy Loki, after the Norse trickster god, and the name is quite fitting because it remained hidden in plain sight for a very long time. How did astronomers find Loki? V. Belokurov based on the images by Marcus and Gail Davies and Robert Gendler The discovery came down to star chemistry. The first stars that formed after the Big Bang were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Over billions of years, later generations of stars fused those elements into heavier ones. Stars with very little of those heavier elements are therefore considered ancient, and astronomers call them metal-poor.…