Discovery of Historic Stars Close to Solar May Rewrite the Milky Means’s Historical past

A brand new research has revealed that the Milky Means’s skinny disk could also be a lot older than beforehand believed, due to the invention of historic stars situated surprisingly near our Solar. Researchers utilizing knowledge from the European House Company’s Gaia area telescope have discovered that a few of these stars fashioned lower than a billion years after the Large Bang, making them greater than 13 billion years outdated.

This discovery challenges the long-standing perception that the Milky Means’s skinny disk, the place most stars, together with the Solar, reside, fashioned round eight to 10 billion years in the past. As an alternative, the brand new findings counsel that the formation of this area of the Galaxy started as early as 4-5 billion years sooner than beforehand thought. This vital revision to the timeline might dramatically alter our understanding of the Milky Means’s historical past and evolution.

The researchers, led by Samir Nepal, a doctoral candidate on the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany, dated these historic stars utilizing superior machine-learning methods. By analysing knowledge collected by the Gaia spacecraft, the workforce was in a position to estimate the ages and metallic content material of over 800,000 stars within the photo voltaic neighbourhood—a area spanning about 3,200 light-years across the Solar. The outcomes, posted on the pre-print arXiv server and introduced by AIP on July 31, present that many of those stars are greater than 10 billion years outdated, with some exceeding 13 billion years in age.

The presence of such historic stars within the skinny disk of the Milky Means is a shocking and intriguing discover. On condition that the universe itself is round 13.eight billion years outdated, the existence of those stars means that this a part of our galaxy will need to have fashioned very early within the universe’s historical past, inside the first billion years after the Large Bang.

The research highlights an sudden facet of those historic stars—their metallic content material. Stars that fashioned within the early universe are metal-poor as a result of they had been created when the universe was predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium.