Our Milky Way is not showing its age.

She would be older than the scientists first thought.

It would indeed have appeared 13 billion years ago, or 2 billion years earlier than its previously established age, reports

Numerama

.

This is the conclusion of a study published on March 23 in the journal

Nature Astronomy

and relayed by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The researchers used two sources: ESA's Gaia mission, which seeks to create an accurate three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars, and data from LAMOST (Wide Field Fiber Optic Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope) , which analyzes the chemical composition of stars.

250,000 stars studied with precision

"To unravel the history of how our galaxy is assembled, we need to know how many stars were born, when, from what material, and in what orbits," the researchers say in their study.

Thus, the precise analysis of 250,000 stars has made it possible to discover an unprecedented fact.

Part of the Milky Way, known as the "thick disk", is thought to have started forming just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Two billion years later, the Milky Way and the dwarf galaxy Gaia-Enceladus merged, creating most of the stars in this thick disk.

The expansion then continued until 6 billion years after the Big Bang.

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