Galactic Graves and Our Past
- Anna Oliva
- Nov 27, 2022
- 1 min read
In recent years there has been a craze, in the US at least, for finding family history and genealogy. It is this same fascination that has fueled my interest in stars and their structure, as these behemoths create the elements that form the foundation for all organic life, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, when they die. Because of this, I consider stars to be some cosmic precursor to humanity, like the great titans were for the Olympians of Greek mythology.
Like our family, stars can tell stories about their lives and the universe’s past. Astronomers have recently created simulations of predicted locations of black holes and neutron stars, the remnants of dead stars. In this study of the morbidly named “stellar corpses” of ancient stars, astronomers have found that our galaxy’s characteristic spiral disk shape was not present in the ancient universe. Instead, the arrangement of stars was in a spherical cloud three times as tall as our current disk. Some stars were ejected out of the galaxy, lowering the amount of visible mass in the Milky Way. This means there’s more dark matter than previously hypothesized.
The paper, from researchers at the University of Sydney:
Further reading:
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