Incredible Objects Recently Discovered in the Thin Disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, Home to Earth.
According to Sci-News, astonishing objects have just been found in the thin disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, which includes ancient metal-poor stars, some of which are up to 13 billion years old.
This indicates that they belong to the class of “ancient monsters” formed during the earliest periods of the universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Thus, it seems that the history of the Milky Way may need to be rewritten.
The Sun (orange) is surrounded by many younger stars (blue) and older stars (red), some of which are up to 10-13 billion years old – (Photo: ESA).
The “band” of the Milky Way that we commonly refer to is actually a complex spiral galaxy.
Dr. Samir Nepal from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (Germany), the lead author of the new study, explains: “The Milky Way has a large halo, a bulge and a bar at the center, a thick disk, and a thin disk.” Most stars reside in this thin disk and orbit in an organized manner around the center of the galaxy. The “middle-aged” stars, like our Sun which is 4.6 billion years old, are included as well. This disk is believed to have begun forming 8-10 billion years ago.
Using the latest data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft, astronomers studied stars located about 3,200 light-years from the Sun.
They discovered that we are situated in the midst of a crowd of ancient monsters, much older than previously thought, with most being over 10 billion years old, and some even exceeding 13 billion years.
Since the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, the first billion years is referred to as the “Cosmic Dawn”, during which humanity has long believed the universe was filled with strange objects that are no longer in existence.
Occasionally, humanity finds “time-traveling” images from the past of some such objects, thanks to advanced telescopes.
However, it is hard to believe that many objects from that era have always surrounded us, coexisting in the same galaxy. They also reveal details that overturn long-standing cosmological theories.
These ancient stars exhibit a diverse metal composition.
Some are very metal-poor, just as science has previously argued: the original stars were composed only of a few of the first elements in the periodic table, before their cores acted like reactors that forged heavier metals.
When such a star dies, it explodes, scattering new metals everywhere, thus creating material for new generations of stars with richer compositions. These new generations of stars continue to forge even heavier metals, resulting in the rich variety of elements we find in the universe today.
However, some super-ancient stars have metal content twice that of the Sun, indicating that rapid metal enrichment occurred during the “childhood” of the Milky Way, alongside vigorous star formation.
Moreover, the Milky Way is much older than we thought.
These stars also suggest that the assumption about the first massive but short-lived stars may not be accurate. Clearly, some ancient stars have lived longer than the lifespan we predict for the Sun.
This evidence, along with many other strange findings regarding galaxies and massive black holes in regions of space around 13 billion light-years away, recently discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, has challenged several long-held theories.
They indicate that our universe has evolved along a rugged path, possibly mirroring the evolution of life on Earth, with phases of explosive growth and decline interspersed.
The research was recently published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
