The Milky Way is ancient and massive, a collection of hundreds of billions of stars, some dating back to the Universe’s early days. During its long life, it’s grown to these epic proportions through mergers with other, smaller galaxies
What is the stream of stars around the Milky Way?
These vast “streams” of stars each contain the mass of 10 million suns and are up to 13 billion years old. They span wide swathes of the galaxy and may be some of the earliest building blocks of our Milky Way, scientists with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) said
What is the Milky Ways history?
The Milky Way gets its name from a Greek myth about the goddess Hera who sprayed milk across the sky. In other parts of the world, our galaxy goes by other names. In China it’s called the “Silver River,” and in the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, it’s called the “Backbone of Night.”
Who said the Milky Way was made of stars?
In 1750, English astronomer Thomas Wright, published An original theory or new hypothesis of the Universe. In this book, Wright speculated that the Milky Way was a flat layer of stars, a part of which which was our solar system
What is the largest star stream in the universe?
the Giant Coma Stream
The researchers named the first-of-its-kind structure the Giant Coma Stream — so named because it is also the largest stellar stream ever found
Who is the god of the Milky Way?
The ancient Egyptian sky goddess Nut is usually depicted as a woman bedecked in stars, arching her body high over the Earth. Now scholars believe that Nut, pronounced “Newt”, may be the depiction of the Milky Way, which hung in the heavens like a white rainbow when the ancient myths were born
Who saw the Milky Way first?
Galileo was the first to see the Milky Way Galaxy in 1610 as individual stars through the telescope
The Milky Way is ancient and massive, a collection of hundreds of billions of stars, some dating back to the Universe’s early days. During its long life, it’s grown to these epic proportions through mergers with other, smaller galaxies. These mergers punctuate our galaxy’s history, and its story is written in the streams of stars left behind as evidence after a merger. And it’s still happening today. The Milky Way is currently digesting smalle
The Giant Coma Stream is the first-of-its-kind stream of stars between galaxies. It’s 10 times longer than the Milky Way and is located in the Coma Berenices cluster, 300 million light-years away. The stream is named after the Coma
Stellar streams are elongated threads of stars that are gravitationally entwined and have likely been torn away from their parent galaxies or nebulas. The discovery of the Giant Coma Stream might help reveal more about the nature of dark matter.
Astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands, Spain, spotted the stream. The black streak in the image is the stream of stars, while the yellow spots and ovals are the galaxies of the Coma cluster
Every star that you see in the sky is part of the same enormous galaxy. Our solar system resides in a galaxy called the Milky Way, stuffed with between 100 billion and 400 billion other stars, many of them with planets of their own.
The Milky Way got its name from the way it looks from the ground: like a streak of spilt milk across the sky. That hazy white band is made up of stars, dust and gas. It looks like a flat stripe because we are viewing it from within its disk; if we were able to get above the Milky Way, it would look like an enormous spiral about 100,000 light years across
The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past
The galaxy’s stars keep a record of its history. By reading those stories, astronomers are learning more about how the Milky Way came to be—and about the galaxy we live in today.
Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But through a telescope it sharpened into a brilliant ellipse called the Andromeda Nebula. To settle a debate about the size of the Milky Way—which was then thought to be the entire universe—Hubble needed to determine Andromeda’s distance from us.
Our Island Universe
From the Earth’s surface—if you are somewhere very dark—you can only see the bright stripe of the Milky Way’s galactic disk, edge-on. But the galaxy we live in is so much more complicated
The map of our island universe is not as neat as it once seemed. Nor as calm.
“If you look at a traditional picture of the Milky Way, you have this nice spherical halo and a nice regular-looking disk, and everything is kind of settled and stationary. But what we know now is that this galaxy is in a state of disequilibrium,” said Charlie Conroy, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This picture of it being simple and well ordered has been really tossed out in the past couple of years.”
Relics of the Milky Way’s birth have just been discovered hiding in plain sight.
Towards the center of the galaxy, two streams of stars nearly as old as the Universe have been discovered circling the heart of the Milky Way. A new analysis based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope strongly suggests that these ancient streams existed before the Milky Way even had its spiral arms – when it was just a baby galaxy extending its first tendrils of stars out into the space around it.
These two streams, discovered by astrophysicist Khyati Malhan and astronomer Hans Walter-Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, have been named Shiva and Shakti after the creators of the Universe in Hindu mythology.
“What’s truly amazing is that we can detect these ancient structures at all,” Malhan says. “The Milky Way has changed so significantly since these stars were born that we wouldn’t expect to recognize them so clearly as a group – but the unprecedented data we’re getting from Gaia made it possible.”
Moreover, these structures can be used to determine the history of the Milky Way. Some stellar streams, for instance, can be traced to disrupted clusters of stars. Others are the remnants of other galaxiesthat fell into and were torn apart by the gravity of the Milky Way
Each stream has a mass of around 10 million Suns, orbiting in the same direction as the rotation of the Milky Way. Shiva is closer to the galactic center with more elliptical orbits; Shakti is a little farther out, but its stars trace more circular paths around the galactic center.
There’s a long list of these stellar streams in the Milky Way, though the original galaxies that spawned them are long gone, absorbed by the Milky Way. But the streams still tell the tale of ancient mergers and absorptions. They hold kinematic and chemical clues to the galaxies and clusters they spawned in.
If we find a pearl necklace with a few scattered pearls nearby, we can deduce that something may have come along and broken the string.”
I’m really excited about using stellar streams to learn about dark matter,” said Nora Shipp, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and co-convener of the Dark Matter Working Group in the Rubin Observatory/LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. “With Rubin Observatory we’ll be able to use stellar streams to figure out how dark matter is distributed in our galaxy from the largest scales down to very small scales.”
Stellar streams are like strings of pearls, whose stars trace the path of the system’s orbit and have a shared history,” said Jaclyn Jensen, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. Jensen plans to use Rubin/LSST data for her research on the progenitors of stellar streams and their role in forming the Milky Way. “Using properties of these stars, we can determine information about their origins and what kind of interactions the stream may have experienced. If we find a pearl necklace with a few scattered pearls nearby, we can deduce that something may have come along and broken the string.”
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