HONG KONG: A new map of the Milky Way, created by scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), shows that a surprisingly large proportion, 30 per cent, of its stars are wanderers that have dramatically changed orbits during their lifetimes.
The discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal, brings a new understanding of how stars are formed, and how they travel throughout our galaxy, researchers say.
To build a map of the Milky Way, scientists used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph to observe 100,000 stars over a four-year period.
“The chemical composition of a star is really a ‘fossil record’ of the chemical makeup of the gas cloud in which the star formed,” says Jonathan Bird, a postdoctoral fellow in the Vanderbilt University Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics.
“APOGEE’s main mission is to collect these fossils from all over the galaxy.”
One of the uses of this astro-fossil record is to determine where stars were born. As they burn, stars create heavy elements. When they die, these elements are dispersed into the surrounding area.
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