The halo of the Milky Way is old. You’ve probably heard that a million times. But can we know more about its age than simply “it’s old”? Yes, we can — and that leads to interesting results!
Image credits: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss/Ohio State/A Gupta et al.
As smaller galaxies collide with our own they’re slowly torn apart. By watching how they spread across the night’s sky we can infer an incredible amount about the shape of the galaxy and the nature of dark matter.
White dwarf stars are the final evolutionary state of most stars. They are everywhere in the Galaxy and are relatively easy to model. So can we learn about our Galaxy solely by studying them? The authors of today’s paper show us a way.
Image credits: ESO/Y. Beletsky.
Our galaxy is not just made up of stars and dark matter, but a huge weight of dust, extending out much further than we can see. Now we’re starting to pin down the properties of our surrounding mysterious gas cloud, and new evidence shows that it’s busy doing it’s own thing.
Deep imaging of a nearby dwarf galaxy reveals a new globular cluster.
Recent surveys of the sky showed the presence of stars that seem to be too young for the population that they belong to. In today’s bite, we will see that cannibalism between two very close stars could be a viable way to produce these curious objects.