Rivers of Streaming Stars

This is scary, I always assumed that our galaxy was just that — a solo act. It seems that part of our galaxy contains smaller galaxies which were torn apart by the Milky Way:

Rivers of Stars Found in Milky Way

“Astronomers have discovered nearly a dozen new stellar rivers—strings of moving stars—over the disk of the Milky Way. The streams, which seem to represent smaller galaxies torn apart by our own, come from scans of the velocities of about a quarter million stars in our galaxy made for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”