The Milky Way is Surrounded by a Vast Graveyard of Dead Stars

As you might expect, the stellar remains statistically experience a kind of blurring effect in their positions. The distribution of these stars is in a plane three times thicker than that of the visible Milky Way. But the team found one aspect of their distribution that was quite surprising. About a third of these old dead stars are being ejected from the galaxy.

This means that over time the Milky Way is “evaporating,” or losing mass, which is unexpected. We know that small clusters of stars such as globular clusters can evaporate, but the Milky Way is much more massive, so you would think long-term evaporation would be minimal. Another aspect of the model that was surprising, is that these stellar remains are fairly evenly distributed throughout the Milky Way. Most stars should have a stellar remnant within a hundred light years of them. For the Sun, the most likely distance of the closest stellar remnant is about 65 light years. So we could have a celestial ghost in our backyard and not even know it.

As more sky survey observatories come online, such as Rubin Observatory, we are likely to catch microlensing events and discover where these stellar remains actually are. Then we will finally be able to see the galactic underworld all around us.

BrianKoberlein I came for the story and stayed for the pretty pictures.

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