Our Galaxy Is Made out of a Bunch of Stars Which Are Not From the Milky Way

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We know that one day, we will kill some of the galaxies out there. Not soon, but it will happen. As of now, we already started to eat bits of them.

Or, at least, this is what some published papers have to say, from The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers found some strange young stars, placed at the edge of our galaxy. It was concluded that these stars formed from the material bitten off of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which is a pair of dwarf galaxies that our galaxy keeps eating.

The stars can be found in the corner of the Milky Way because the region is not producing new stars. It’s quite different than what’s happening at the center of the galaxy, where most of the fuel in the far reaches has already been finished. Studies show that the stars were quite young.

Our Galaxy Is Made out of a Bunch of Stars Which Are Not From the Milky Way

Adrian Price-Whelan, who is a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, stated that the region is really far away. “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 details showed that the stars are made out of weird ingredients because of their segment of the galaxy. The light that reached our planet indicates that at least 27 stars from the cluster had a low metal content, a thing that shows that the material produced comes from outside our galaxy.

According to one of the paper, the leading arm of the Magellanic Stream is the reason behind the whole deal – a cloud of gas that’s coming from the Magellanic Clouds toward the Milky Way, which is not as dense as it is supposed to be in order to produce stars on its own.

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