While scanning the sidebar on BA's blog, I noticed this:

I don't recall ever having seen BA talk about any Galaxy Hoax. Is this some new conspiracy theory out there that just started up?

ABC (Australia) News in Science: Galaxy hoax claims we're aliens

See BA Blog:
Is the Sun from another galaxy?
Alien Sun followup
Alien Sun, final (?) comment

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Note that those "popular searches" are placed by Google and not related to the BA's content. I figured that out the other day when when I followed a "moon hoax" one and got a Hoagland page saying we did go to the moon and discovered crystal palaces!

Edit: or maybe not. I just tried that again and did seem to be getting BA content. I'm not sure what I followed!

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I'm pretty sure the searches asked about are the popular ones entered into that lijit.com searchbox just above them, right side of the Bad Astronomy main page (and maybe other pages).

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That's actually a little disappoining. For it would have meant we would pass 'over' the milky way. What a view that would have been....

That's a hoax? Wow what a crappy hoax. It's not even cool if it were true.

If it were the case that our own star was part of a stream of stars being stripped from another galaxy, it would be easily visible I would think. Heck, the night sky would be that much cooler!

I have heard that the Sagittarius Dwarf is being 'eaten' by our galaxy, but it is very diffiucult to tell, since it is happening on the other side of our galaxies core in relation to us. Not sure if that has been verified or not though.

That this is going on in our own personal Galaxy, right when we're looking, suggests that this kind of amoeboid accretion by engulfment is a routine phenomenon.

Do we know if this occurs with ellipticals? Stellar population suggests maybe not -- but okay, why not?

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Certainly, we can see examples. It doesn't cause the fireworks we see with spirals, with no cool gas to trigger new star formation, and the almost-randomly directed internal motions of stars mean that ellipticals don't make the kinds of narrow, obvious tails that disk galaxies do - more like broad, dim fans of starlight. Ellipticals pretty much merge to make bigger ellipticals, which may be important in working out where the very biggest and brightest "ordinary" galaxies come from. (The jargon for the process is "dry merging").

Why is this theory, which seems to be unsubstantiated but isn't on the face of it entirely ridiculous, a hoax?

Perhaps ask the popular-science writer, Marilyn Head, who appears to have playfully invented the phrase: ABC (Australia) Science Online -- Galaxy hoax claims we're aliens

The way it's written, I doubt astronomers actually used the phrase "galaxy hoax" to describe the claim -- at least before this story emerged.

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