Origins Of The Milky Way Galaxy: Newly Discovered Famliy Of Stars May Shed New Insights

Most people are curious about what are the origins of the universe. Thus, more research is being conducted. Currently, an astronomer discovered a family of stars that might lead to the origins of the Milky Way Galaxy.

A new family of stars is recently discovered by an astronomer from LJMU's Astrophysics Research Institute. It was located at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy that provides new light on the early stage of the galaxy's formation. The discovery led them at the root of globular clusters, which is the concentration of typically a million stars developed at the beginning of the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, according to Phys.Org.

LJMU is a member of an international partnership of scientists at numerous institutions called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. One of its projects is the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment or APOGEE. They collect infrared data for hundreds of thousands of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

In a report by Space Daily, it stated that the new family of stars has the possibility to belong to a globular cluster that was ruined during the violent initial formation of the galactic center. In that case, there could have been 10 times more globular clusters found in the Milky Way Galaxy in early life compared today. It simply means that a massive fraction of the old stars located in the inner part of the galaxy today has the possibility that it was formed in globular clusters and was later destroyed.

The project lead researcher Ricardo Schiavon said that "This is a very exciting finding that helps us address fascinating questions such as what is the nature of the stars in the inner regions of the Milky Way, how globular clusters formed and what role they played in the formation of the early Milky Way and by extension the formation of other galaxies."

"From our observations, we could determine the chemical compositions of thousands of stars, among which we spotted a considerable number of stars that differed from the bulk of the stars in the inner regions of the Galaxy, due to their very high abundance of nitrogen."

However, the researchers are not that certain that these stars resulted from globular cluster destruction. They could also be the byproducts of the first episodes of star formation taking place at the beginning of the galaxy's history. They are still conducting further observations to test these hypotheses.