WASHINGTON: The Milky Way’s star-birthing frenzy peaked 10 billion years ago, but our Sun was a late boomer, not forming until roughly 5 billion years ago, according to one of the most detailed galaxy surveys yet. Astronomers found that galaxies like our Milky Way underwent a stellar “baby boom,” churning out stars at a prodigious rate, about 30 times faster than today.
Our Sun, however, is a late “boomer,” researchers said. By that time the star formation rate in our galaxy had plunged to a trickle. However, the Sun’s late appearance may actually have fostered the growth of our Solar System’s planets, research-ers said. Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were more abundant later in the star-forming boom as more massive stars ended their lives early and enriched the galaxy with material that served as the building blocks of planets and even life on Earth.
Astronomers don’t have baby pictures of our Milky Way’s formative years to trace the history of stellar growth so they studied galaxies similar in mass to our Milky Way, found in deep surveys of the universe. The farther into the universe astronomers look, the further back in time they are seeing, because starlight from long ago is just arriving at Earth now. From those surveys, stretching back in time more than 10 billion years, researchers assembled an album of images containing nearly 2,000 snapshots of Milky Way-like galaxies. The new census provides the most complete picture yet of how galaxies like the Milky Way grew over the past 10 billion years into today’s majestic spiral galaxies.
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