In January Steven Majewski of the University of Virginia and his colleagues announced that they had found a suspicious excess of stars of the same colour and brightness as those in Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy, or Sgr for short, stretching away from it in a long tail. This summer they hope to measure the speed of those stars. If they do turn out to belong to Sgr, says Dr Majewski, it will confirm that the dwarf has spent at least the past 800m years being torn apart.