Far out cosmology: our early galaxy formation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 22, 2022, 00:41 (792 days ago) @ David Turell

From new studies:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/milky-way-galaxy-nucleus-oldest-stars-protogalaxy

"The Milky Way left its “poor old heart” in and around the constellation Sagittarius, astronomers report. New data from the Gaia spacecraft reveal the full extent of what seems to be the galaxy’s original nucleus — the ancient stellar population that the rest of the Milky Way grew around — which came together more than 12.5 billion years ago.

"The Milky Way’s ancient heart is a round protogalaxy that spans nearly 18,000 light-years and possesses roughly 100 million times the mass of the sun in stars, or about 0.2 percent of the Milky Way’s current stellar mass, Rix and colleagues report in a study posted September 7 at arXiv.org.

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"Most stars in the Milky Way’s central region abound with metals, because the stars originated in a crowded metropolis that earlier stellar generations had enriched with those metals through supernova explosions. But Rix and his colleagues wanted to find the exceptions to the rule, stars so metal-poor they must have been born well before the rest of the galaxy’s stellar denizens came along — what Rix calls “a needle-in-a-haystack exercise.”

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"The astronomers then examined how those stars move through space, retaining only the ones that don’t dart off into the vast halo of metal-poor stars engulfing the Milky Way’s disk. The end result: a sample of 18,000 ancient stars that represents the kernel around which the entire galaxy blossomed, the researchers say. By accounting for stars obscured by dust, Rix estimates that the protogalaxy is between 50 million and 200 million times as massive as the sun.

“'That’s the original core,” Rix says, and it harbors the Milky Way’s oldest stars, which he says probably have ages exceeding 12.5 billion years. The protogalaxy formed when several large clumps of stars and gas conglomerated long ago, before the Milky Way’s first disk — the so-called thick disk — arose

"The protogalaxy is compact, which means little has disturbed it since its formation. Smaller galaxies have crashed into the Milky Way, augmenting its mass, but “we didn’t have any later mergers that deeply penetrated into the core and shook it up, because then the core would be larger now,” Rix says.

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"Today, the Milky Way is a giant galaxy that spins rapidly — each hour our solar system speeds through 900,000 kilometers of space as we race around the galaxy’s center. But the new study shows that the Milky Way got its start as a modest protogalaxy whose stars still shine today, stars that astronomers can now scrutinize for further clues to the galaxy’s birth and early evolution."

Comment: further evidence showing how God evolves His purposes. The story of the Milky Way's evolution is coming clearer.