[3] The first suggestion of a new galaxy in Virgo was made in 2001 from data obtained as part of the QUEST survey, which used the one-metre Schmidt telescope at the Llano del Hato National Astronomical Observatory in Venezuela to search for RR Lyrae variable stars.

Despite its proximity to the Solar System and the solid angle that it consequently covers, the stream contains only a few hundred thousand stars.

The stream lies within the Milky Way, approximately 10 kiloparsecs (30,000 light-years) from the Sun, and extending over a region of space at least 10 kpc across in three dimensions.

It is close on the plane of the sky to the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which was found in 1994 through a similar photometric analysis of a star survey.

[7] The Virgo Stellar Stream also resembles the Monoceros Ring, found in 2002,[8] which has similarly been attributed to the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy merging with the Milky Way.