Scientists from the University of Vienna discovered a new stellar flow - the remnants of a star cluster that was torn apart by the gravitational forces of the Milky Way about 1 billion years ago. The object is located about 326 light-years from Earth - by cosmic standards is not far away - and consists of more than 4 thousand luminaries orbiting the center of our galaxy. The length of this stellar "river" reaches 1.3 thousand light years, and its width is 160 light years.
“Finding nearby star streams is just as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. The astronomers ’recent наход discovery’ has been present in their field of vision for a long time, since it наибольш covers ’the largest part of the night sky ñ just the understanding that they are observing the stellar ow only came to them now,” said study author Juan Alves.
The discovery was made thanks to the data of the Gaia telescope on the location and motion of more than 1 billion stars in our galaxy. With this information, scientists were able to make the most accurate and detailed three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.
- Star Flow on the Milky Way map
- © Stefan Meingast, ESA / Gaia / DPAC
Note that astronomers currently know 15 stellar flows in the Milky Way. All of them are “remnants” of a globular star cluster or a dwarf galaxy torn by the gravitational forces of the Milky Way in the distant past.
“Most of the star clusters of the galactic disk after birth begin to rapidly dissipate due to the fact that the stars in them are too small to form a sufficient gravitational potential. In other words, they lack the “glue” that would hold the stars close to each other. However, it turned out that even in the vicinity of the Sun there are several clusters with a stellar mass sufficient to ensure that the stars remain “connected” with each other for several hundred million years, ”explained the author of the study Stefan Meingast.
In the future, the authors of the study plan to find new star clusters using the Gaia telescope database.