Astrophysicists have found a new region of the Milky Way, and it is filled with hot hot, bright blue stars that are about to explode.
The researchers were creating the most detailed map to date of the star-colored spiral arms in our galactic environment with the Gaia Telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) when they discovered the region, which they called the Cepheus incentive. .
Located between the Orion Arm – where we solar system is – and the constellation Perseus, the incentive is a belt between two spiral arms filled with enormous stars three times as large as the sun and blue colored by their blowing heat.
Astronomers call these giant, blue stars OB stars because of the predominantly blue wavelengths of light they emit. They are the rarest, hottest, shortest and largest stars in the entire galaxy. The violent nuclear reactions that take place in their hearts make them six times hotter than the sun. And the enormous star explosions that end their lives – called supernovae – scatter the heavy elements that are essential for complex life far into the galaxy.
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“OB stars are rare, in a Milky Way of 400 billion stars there are less than 200,000,” co-author Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, a researcher at the Spanish Astrobiological Center (CAB), told WordsSideKick. “And because they are responsible for the creation of many heavy elements, it can really be seen as the chemical enrichers of the galaxy. It is because of stars like these who died long ago, that the geochemistry of our planet was complex. enough for biochemistry to emerge. ‘Wherever we find blue stars, we find the most active and “living” regions of the galaxy, according to the researchers.
The researchers compiled their star map by drawing the distance from the stars to a triangle Earth using a technique called stellar parallax. By comparing the apparent positions of the stars, observed from different perspectives during the Earth’s orbit around the sun, astronomers can calculate the distances to the stars themselves. Using this technique, together with the data from the ESA’s Gaia Telescope, the team mapped stars at distances beyond the proposed one and in areas of space previously considered empty.
“After months of work, we saw this beautiful map for the first time,” Pantaleoni González said. “I felt like I was an explorer of enlightenment and traced the first accurate maps of our world – just now on a different scale. I was extremely humble and small to see how big our stellar environment is.”
Scientists have proven that the new region is part of the spiral galactic disk that contains most of our galaxy’s material, and not just a random alignment of stars, by seeing them consistently move in the same direction.
They also suspect that looking at the position of the spur, which is slightly above the galactic disk, could give tantalizing hints about the Milky Way’s past.
“If we live in a galaxy with wave formation, which has slight vertical variations or ripples across the disk, it could indicate a history of violent evolution for our galaxy,” Pantaleoni González said. “These could be signs of past collisions with other galaxies.”
The next step for the researchers is to place additional OB stars on a more precise map, which they hope will provide even more insights into our Galaxy’s structures.
The researchers published their findings in the journal on March 19 Monthly notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
Originally published on Live Science.