First, they questioned Pluto. He's no longer a planet; he's just plain Mickey's pet now. Not really...and the space party's just getting started.

Not content with just reviewing planets, scientists have now gone on to bigger planes - literally. Their target: the Milky Way. No, don't worry. I don't think they're aiming to demote it as well to some nutty chocolate bar. What they're reviewing is the existing concept on how it all began.

The Milky Way is home to our Solar System along with at least 200-400 billion stars. The galaxy was tagged as milky given the hazy band of white light appearing across the celestial sphere visible from Earth, comprising of stars and other material lying within the galactic plane.

New study suggests that the Milky Way might not have formed through the merger of smaller galaxies, as previously believed. Rather, it was formed by some other yet unknown process. According to Manuela Zoccali of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, "The Milky Way is the only galaxy in the universe that we can study in detail. Still, we haven't yet understood how it did form."

Based on current theoretical models, the formation was caused by dwarf galaxies getting larger and larger galaxies, as multiple star packs clumped together or a heftier galaxy started gobbling up its neighbors. However, "We have proved that this is not the case," said Zoccali. Because if it were, then the stars in the galactic bulge should have once been part of the disk.

Zoccali discovered, along with an international team of astronomers, that the stars at the center of the Milky Way showed distinct element amounts compared to the disk stars. This shows that the two galaxy components formed separately. They found this out using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Paranal, Chile. "In other words, bulge stars did not originate in the disk and then migrate inward to build up the bulge but rather formed independently of the disk," she notes further.

The bulge that is stirring all these is the starry center protruding from the flattened disk.

Well, this certainly gives scientists a lot to think about in the coming years. I just kinda wish they also gave more thought to the name of that telescope.