• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Ancient Stars Found In Unlikely Region Of The Milky Way

August 1, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy. Its main components are a bulge at the center, a thin disk and a thick disk where the spiral arms are located, and a halo. The thin disk is believed to be the youngest component of the galaxy. So imagine how surprised astronomers were when they found some stars in it almost as old as the universe.

Advertisement

The thin disk is where the Solar System is. The Sun is middle-aged, being around 5 billion years old, and the disk was believed to have started forming between 8 and 10 billion years ago. Still, there are uncertainties, so astronomers looked for old stars. At the beginning of the universe, only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium were available. Ancient stars tend to have less “pollution” from heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon, or iron.

So researchers set out to build an age census of stars in the thin disk within 3,200 light-years from the Sun. They found a surprising number of stars which are very old. Most of these ancient stars are over 10 billion years old. A few are over 13, billion years old. They formed when the universe was several hundred million years old.

“These ancient stars in the disk suggest that the formation of the Milky Way’s thin disk began much earlier than previously believed, by about 4–5 billion years,” lead author Samir Nepal from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam said in a statement.

The work suggests two things. First, the thin disk of a galaxy can form pretty quickly. This matches observations of ancient galaxies from JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). The Milky Way is now in line with the expectations from those distant observations.

The second finding is that the Milky Way had to experience some pretty intense star-formation episodes. The massive stars from these episodes that went supernova provided the enrichment in heavy elements seen throughout the disk.

Advertisement

“Our study suggests that the thin disk of the Milky Way may have formed much earlier than we had thought, and that its formation is strongly related to the early chemical enrichment of the innermost regions of our galaxy,” explained co-author Dr Cristina Chiappini. “The combination of data from different sources and the application of advanced machine learning techniques have enabled us to increase the number of stars with high quality stellar parameters, a key step to lead our team to these new insights.”

The data used in this study comes from the European Space Agency mission Gaia. The spacecraft continues to build the most precise map of the Milky Way galaxy, providing precise measurements on the position, motion, and properties of billions of stars.

A paper discussing these results is accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers
  2. Thai central bank stands pat on rates, no easing seen this year
  3. A Mysterious “Tomato Flu” Outbreak Is Spreading Among Kids In India
  4. What Is A Time Crystal?

Source Link: Ancient Stars Found In Unlikely Region Of The Milky Way

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Brand New Microscope Designed For Underwater Reveals Stunning Details Of Corals
  • The Atlantic’s Major Circulation Current Is Showing Worrying Signs, But Is Collapse Near?
  • “The Rings Held The Answer”: How We Finally Figured Out Saturn’s Day Length In 2019
  • Mystery Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” Solved By A Dentist And A Protractor
  • Asteroid Ryugu’s Latest Mineral Is As Weird As Finding “A Tropical Seed In The Arctic”
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We Living Through A Sixth Mass Extinction?
  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away
  • NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Recorded Evidence Of Electrified Dust Devils On Mars
  • “Hymn to Babylon”: Missing Mesopotamian Text Dating Back Nearly 3,000 Years Discovered
  • Multiple New Species Of Cute Spotty And Stripy Geckos Discovered In Remote Cambodia
  • ChatGPT May Be Surprisingly Good At Piloting Spacecraft, Taking 2nd Place In Spaceflight Competition
  • Incredible Supernova Finding Shows That “Double-Detonation Mechanism” Happens In Nature
  • Soda Cans, Asthma Inhalers, And… Water Bottles? All Things That Could Explode In Your Car This Summer
  • Video: Is There An Ideal Sleeping Position?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version