LONDON: Astronomers have successfully designed blueprints the Milky Way galaxy’s early construction phase with the help of NASA’s space telescope, Hubble Space Telescope. They used the telescope to look at the galaxy’s heart.
While looking into the galaxy’s crowded central hub of stars, the astronomers spotted a population of ancient white dwarfs. It was the first time when such a thing was uncovered by astronomers. Now, the astronomers are hoping that the finding will help in knowing how the Milky Way galaxy was formed, long before the sun and out home planet.
According to the researchers, the new observations are the most detail study of the Milky Way’s structure. It is central bulge present in the center of a disk full of stars, where the solar system is present.
The new observations suggested that the galaxy’s stellar inhabitants formed after the formation of bulge. The disk’s second and third-generation stars formed slowly in the suburbs. Annalisa Calamida from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) said the Milky Way’s bulge is the only bulge that can be study in detail and it is very important to study it. Bulges can be seen in distant galaxies, but it is not possible to see the white dwarfs, Calamida added.
“The Milky Way’s bulge includes almost a quarter of the galaxy’s stellar mass. Characterizing the properties of the bulge stars can then provide important information to understanding the formation of the entire Milky Way galaxy and that of similar, more distant galaxies”, Calamida, the science paper’s lead author, explained.
