Patrick Pester is a freelance writer and previously a staff writer at Live Science. His background is in wildlife conservation and he has worked with endangered species around the world. Patrick holds a master's degree in international journalism from Cardiff University in the U.K.
Ancient stars located surprisingly near to our sun formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang — suggesting part of the Milky Way is much older than previously thought, a study has found.
Researchers dated these ancient stars by studying data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft and posted their findings to the pre-print arXiv server earlier this year. The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany announced the discovery on Wednesday, July 31. "These ancient stars in the disc suggest that the formation of the Milky Way's thin disc began much earlier than previously believed, by about 4-5 billion years," study lead author Samir Nepal, a doctoral candidate studying the Milky Way at AIP, said in a statement. Scientists are piecing together the history of the Milky Way with Gaia data to create maps that document the age, chemical composition and movement of its stars, according to the statement.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.For the new study, researchers looked at more than 800,000 stars in the solar neighborhood, which runs about 3,200 light-years around the sun; for comparison, the entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide. The team used machine learning to combine different data, giving measurements for variables like the age and metal content of the stars.
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