- 4473 - OLDEST GALAXY - how do we know? The oldest stars in the universe were found hiding near the Milky Way's edge, and they may not be alone. Astronomers reanalyzed the chemical composition of three stars in the Milky Way's halo and found that they are between 12 and 13 billion years old. They may have also been stolen from other galaxies.
----------------------------------- 4473
- OLDEST GALAXY
- how do we know?
-
- Three alien stars circling the Milky Way
could be some of the oldest ever found in the universe. The ancient celestial objects may have been
among the first to form after the Big Bang and were likely stolen by our galaxy
during gravitational tugs-of-war billions of years ago.
-
- Researchers reanalyzed three previously
observed stars each located around 30,000 light-years from Earth in the Milky
Way's halo which is a massive cloud of stars that orbit beyond our galaxy's
main galactic disk. The basic chemical composition of these stars suggests they
are all between 12 and 13 billion years old, making them almost as old as the
universe itself, which formed 13,800,000,000 years ago.
-
- The trio's trajectories through the Milky
Way also hint that these stars did not originate in our galaxy but were instead
stolen from the periphery of some of the universe's oldest galaxies as the
Milky Way brushed past them billions of years ago.
-
- The group of 60 ultra-faint stars orbiting
the Milky Way could be new type of galaxy never seen before. The ancient balls of gas, dubbed “Small Accreted Stellar System” (SASS)
stars, are part of our cosmic family tree.
-
- Normally, stars this old can only be studied
by spying on galaxies from the other side of the known universe or by
reverse-engineering ancient stars from their descendants. However, the
discovery of ancient stars on our cosmic doorstep gives scientists a rare
opportunity to study them directly, and researchers are now confident there are
more stars like these toward our galaxy's edge.
-
- The new discovery came about from an MIT
class. They revealed the stellar trio,
which each had an unusually low abundance of heavy metals such as iron,
strontium and barium in its atmosphere.
One of the stars had around 10,000 times less iron than the sun.
-
- These heavy metals are forged over eons in
the heart of stars, and are also found in the exteriors of younger stars, which
suck up ingredients that were dispersed by exploding dead stars. The fact that
this trio has few heavy metals, means they were formed before most other stars
had exploded.
-
- The stars' compositions hinted that they did
not originate in the Milky Way. But to confirm this, the students traced the
orbital trajectories of the three stars and found that they all had a retrograde
motion, meaning they are circling our galaxy's supermassive black hole in the
opposite direction from a majority of the other stars.
-
- Based on the stars' compositions,
researchers also believe that each star was ripped from a different
galaxy. In a brief follow-up exercise
they identified another 65 retrograde stars with similarly simple compositions.
These stars will now be studied further to determine if they are also SASS
stars.
-
-
May 18, 2024 OLDEST
GALAXY - how do we know? 4473
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