CANADA: It turns out that the increasing and decreasing brightness of some stars might hold clues to their host galaxy’s age, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Monday. Since stars begin to pulsate near the end of their lifetime, that can provide valuable insight into a galaxy’s own lifetime.
Astronomers have measured the “pulses” of thousands of stars in the distant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, or M87, and were able to use that data to calculate that it is about 10 billion years old, a number that corresponds with previous estimates found using other techniques.
“We have relatively few ways to determine how old galaxies are,” Dr. Charlie Conroy, assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post. “This gives us a new tool to determine a galaxy’s age, which is especially important for ancient galaxies like M87. The stars in this galaxy probably formed a very long time ago — maybe 10 billion years ago — and if that’s true then this galaxy is a fossil relic from a much earlier time in the universe.”
The astronomers analyzed images of galaxy M87 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006. They noticed that the combined illumination of all the stars in the galaxy, which is located some 53 million light-years from Earth, varied every 270 days due to the increasing and decreasing brightness of each star.
