Stellar archaeology traces Milky Way`s history
Baku, June 2 (AZERTAC). Unfortunately, stars don`t have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star`s age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way Galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies.
Jason Kalirai from the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University`s Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Maryland, has found the next best thing to a star`s birth certificate. Using a new technique, Kalirai probed the burned-out relics of Sun-like stars, called white dwarfs, in the inner region of our Milky Way Galaxy`s halo. The halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding our galaxy`s disk.
Those stars, his study reveals, are 11.5 billion years old, younger than the first generation of Milky Way stars. They formed more than 2 billion years after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Previous age estimates, based on analyzing normal stars in the inner halo, ranged from 10 to 14 billion years.
Kalirai`s study reinforces the emerging view that our galaxy`s halo is composed of a layer-cake structure that formed in stages over billions of years.
"One of the biggest questions in astronomy is: When did the different parts of the Milky Way form?" Kalirai said. "Sun-like stars live for billions of years and are bright, so they are excellent tracers, offering clues to how our galaxy evolved over time. However, the biggest hindrance we have in inferring galactic formation processes in the Milky Way is our inability to measure accurate ages of Sun-like stars. In this study, I chose a different path: I studied stars at the end of their lives to determine their masses and then connected those masses to the ages of their progenitors. Given the nature of these dead stars, their masses are easier to measure than Sun-like stars."
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