The Milky Way may be dead or dying, but help is on the way - CNET

It's possible the Milky Way is starving to death or already dead, but a part of our galaxy that was exiled into space millions of years ago is now barreling its way back home, and when it arrives it may bring with it a snack that could revive the galaxy.

Unless you spend your days studying the life cycle of stars, you're likely confused right now, so let's break that down less metaphorically.

Galaxies like our Milky Way grow by "feeding" off of a cosmic supply of hydrogen gas to form new stars. When the process of star formation in a galaxy begins to slow down or stop, scientists like Kevin Schawinski from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology refer to that galaxy as dead or dying.

Schawinski has been drawing on a crowd of willing volunteer citizen scientists on Galaxy Zoo to try and determine if the Milky Way is in fact in the midst of a terminal decline. The results are uncertain, but he says our galaxy appears to be teetering on the edge of a cliff about to fall toward its inevitable end, if it hasn't already gone over.

"It's entirely possible that the Milky Way galaxy is a zombie, having died a billion years ago," he wrote on Thursday on academic outreach site The Conversation.