Milky Way's Stellar Halo --Filled with Stars Almost as Old as the Universe (Today's Most Popular)

 

                  

The Milky Way's ancient stars once belonged to other galaxies instead of being the earliest stars born inside the galaxy when it began to form about 10 billion years ago. Many of the Milky Way's ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies ripped asunder by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to research that was part of the Aquarius Project, which uses the largest supercomputer simulations to study the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way.

Computer simulations revealed that the ancient stars, found in a stellar halo of debris surrounding the Milky Way, had been torn from smaller galaxies by the gravity generated by colliding galaxies.

Cosmologists predict that the early Universe was full of small galaxies which led short and violent lives, colliding with each other, leaving behind debris which eventually settled into more familiar looking galaxies like the Milky Way. The stellar halo preserves a record of a dramatic primeval period in the life of the Milky Way which ended long before the Sun was born.

"The computer simulations started from the Big Bang, around 13 billion years ago, and used the universal laws of physics to simulate the evolution of dark matter and the stars. These simulations are the most realistic to date, capable of zooming into the very fine detail of the stellar halo structure, including star "streams" -- which are stars being pulled from the smaller galaxies by the gravity generated by colliding galaxies.

One in one hundred stars in the Milky Way belong to the stellar halo, which is much larger than the galaxy's familiar spiral disk. These stars are almost as old as the Universe.

The research was conducted by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology and their collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in Germany, and Groningen University, in Holland. The research was part of the Aquarius Project, which uses the largest supercomputer simulations to study the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way.

The image at top of the page is simulation that shows a Milky Way-like galaxy around five billion years ago when most satellite galaxy collisions were happening. 

The Daily Galaxy via Durham University, UK

Image credit: Credit: Andrew Cooper/John Helly, Durham University.

Comments

[Holographicgalaxy]

Nobody should believe that the Universe is slightly older than when the very first star formed, which was shortly after the first atoms formed.. That is the big-bang theory, which neglects the discovery of the varying electromagnetic cosmic dipole of the fine-structure constant that precedes gravity. More powerful telescopes will reveal greater distances of larger structures like hyperclusters and superclusters in their entirety, that will be too far away to be explained by the big-bang theory.

[Ivar Nielsen]

THE ENDLESS COSMOLOGICAL GUESSWORKS

Quote: "The Milky Way's ancient stars once belonged to other galaxies instead of being the earliest stars born inside the galaxy when it began to form about 10 billion years ago".

Oh yeah? On which assumption are this statement based?

Well yeah, on a PC-simulation filled with data from the illogical Big Bang speculation and the gravity model that is contradicted by directly observations of the movements of the stars themselves in the Milky Way galaxy. (The galaxy curve anomaly)

How can astrophysicists and cosmologists measure the age of a star via some direct observations when a star in our galaxy in fact is orbiting in spiralling circuits several billion of years?

Can one use a linear measurement of light that reflects and fades when meting particles, i.e. not is constant, to measure a circular and spiralling motion and connect this motion to he concept of "time".

The concept of time is a complete illusion because everything is eternally spiralling in and out and therefore all the movements in the Universe are cyclical and logically contradicts the strange and illusive speculations of the linear Big Bang ideas.

Now, make a mathematical equation of this eternal in- and outwards spiralling movements in the Universe and put this in your PC-simulations!

NB: Remember to pay your electricity bill in advance for ever – because you’ll never get a final end result.

Ivar Nielsen
Natural Philosopher

[Ivar Nielsen]

@Holographicgalaxy,

Your linking on your front page blog to this sentence is bad, linking to a site of Andrulis critique.

"Andrulis says "Everything all matter OSCILLATES between EXCITED and GROUND STATES. Gyres dynamically transform energy, matter, light, space, and information into physical systems of reality".

Check it out.

[Olga Altstatt]

We aren't sure when and how BIG BANG happened.Whatever made beautiful galaxy MILKY WAY, WE SHOULD enjoy observing it and think of finding a planet to live on.(Somewhere near SCANDINAVIA.)