Milky Way’s bulge tagged posts

This Hubble Space Telescope image of a sparkling jewel box full of stars captures the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Aging red giant stars coexist with their more plentiful younger cousins, the smaller, white, Sun-like stars, in this crowded region of our galaxy’s ancient central hub, or bulge. Most of the bright blue stars in the image are probably recently formed stars located in the foreground, in the galaxy’s disk. Astronomers studied 10,000 of these Sun-like stars in archival Hubble images over a nine-year period to unearth clues to our galaxy’s evolution. Release type: American Astronomical Society Meeting

A new analysis of about 10,000 normal Sun-like stars in the Milky Way’s bulge reveals that our galaxy’s hub is a dynamic environment of variously aged stars zipping around at diffe...

White dwarf stars in the early Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Calamida and K. Sahu (STScI), and the SWEEPS Science Team; Credit for Ground-based Image: A. Fujii

Peering deep into the Milky Way’s crowded central hub of stars, Hubble researchers have uncovered for the 1st time a population of ancient white dwarfs, smoldering remnants of once-vibrant stars that inhabited the core. This can yield clues to how our galaxy was built, long before Earth/sun formed.

The white dwarfs contain information about the stars that existed about 12 billion years ago that burned out to form the white dwarfs. As these dying embers of once-radiant stars cool, they serve as multi-billion-year-old time pieces that tell astronomers about the Milky Way’s groundbreaking years.

An analysis of the Hubble data suppor...