The newly discovered stars shed light on the first ages of our Milky Way galaxy.
Thanks to an advanced space research technique astronomers have spotted the oldest stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Their identification has been made possible by comparing iron levels, a strong indicative of anaemic stars, according to space scientists.
Astronomers at the Australian National University have been looking for evidence coming from the early ages of the universe for a long time, but it was only recently that they have discovered what appear to be the oldest stars of our galaxy. For the current discovery, researchers have used the advanced technique of the ANU SkyMapper telescope.
This machinery is capable of seeing anaemic stars, that is, celestial bodies containing very small amounts of iron. This piece of information is all that researchers need to understand whether the specific star was formed a long time ago or in more recent periods. According to their previous studies, low-iron stars were the ones that first existed in the universe, fact which has got scientists thinking that the newly discovered celestial bodies could belong to those early ages.
During their recent space investigation, researchers have discovered approximately 14,000 anaemic stars. These have been closely analyzed with the help of the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s Anglo-Australian Telescope because scientists needed to be certain of their consistency. They were afraid the stars could have poor metal content and hence only appear as anemic planetoids.
Investigators have, indeed, confirmed that the newly discovered bodies are anaemic. Moreover, they have also discovered that their structure is very similar to the structure of stars originating from Super Nova explosions.
Based on this newly find, astronomers are advancing the hypothesis, according to which, the early ages of the Milky Way galaxies might have been predominated by very frequent hypernova explosions. Their supposition has to be yet confirmed by future research. So far, it has only been established that the stars were formed when the universe was approximately 300 million years old.
Image source: www.pixabay.com
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