Our Galaxy Has Thousands of Alien Stars That Didn't Come from the Milky Way

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer 9 hours ago

These aren't Milky Way stars.



An image shows the location of the newfound stars and Magellanic Stream's locations in the sky as seen from our vantage point in the Milky Way
(Image: © D. Nidever; NASA)

We're on our way to kill some galaxies, but long before that happens, we're already eating little chunks of them.

That's the conclusion of a new pair of papers published Dec. 5 and Dec. 15 last year in The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers found a few thousand strange young stars at the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and concluded that these had formed from material bitten off of the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, a pair of dwarf galaxies that the Milky Way will eventually devour.

The stars stood out in their distant corner of the Milky Way because that region isn't producing many new stars these days. Unlike at the livelier, denser galactic center, most of the available fuel in the far reaches has already been used up. But analysis showed that these stars were relatively young.

"[This region is] really, really far away," Adrian Price-Whelan, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and lead author of the Dec. 5 paper, said in a statement. "It's farther than any known young stars in the Milky Way, which are typically in the disk. So, right away, I was like, 'Holy smokes, what is this?'"

More:
https://www.livescience.com/magellanic-stars-inside-milky-way.html

[Kurt V.]

1. Incredible stuff!

[keithbvadu2]

2. Should have built a wall.

Should have built a wall.

(Sarcasm thingie goes here)