Those who came from the other side
Those who came from the other side
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Gaia detects stars entering our galaxy from beyond its limits.
The Milky Way it's like a huge river of stars, several hundred billion of them, including the Sun, which swirls around his enigmatic heart. All follow that marked path, although there are some who rebel against the established, following a path completely separated from the rest. These are the so-called "hyperveloces", which in itself define well what we are talking about, stars that due to vicissitudes of fate, perhaps due to a too close encounter with the central black hole, perhaps due to the death of an old companion, they are thrown at such a speed that they have broken the gravitational chains and are destined to lose themselves in the intergalactic darkness, towards a solitude hardly imaginable.
Only a few are known, and with Gaia It was hoped to discover some more. In fact, this is how the second data catalog reunited by this galactic explorer, not a few astronomers set out to search for these fugitives. They specially focused on a subset of seven
million of the brightest stars, which has also been measured with what
speed away from us. "Among them we found twenty who traveled with
fast enough to end up escaping the Milky Way", Explain
Elena Maria Rossi, author of the new study. A surprise, since we expected to find one as much.
However the big surprise was discovering that most of those 20 fugitives were not leaving the Milky Way, but just the opposite, entering it and approaching the galactic heart. We were looking for stars that were rushing into the darkness beyond the limits, but instead they found many others that were doing the opposite: They came from beyond and were entering our star city. The universe is full of surprises, and it is wonderful that it is so.
The question that arises from all this is inevitable: What is the point of origin of these visitors? One of them would be the Great Magellanic Cloud, although they could also come from another even more distant. If that is the case, they carry the "trace" of their place of origin, and their study at much closer distances than their progenitor galaxy can offer unique information about the nature of the stars of other galaxies, similar to what happens when studying Martian material brought to our planet by meteorites. "Stars can accelerate at high speeds when they interact with a supermassive black hole", Points Elena."Thus, its presence could be a sign of this type of black holes in nearby galaxies. But they could also have been part of a binary system, and have been thrown into the Milky Way when its companion exploded in the form of a supernova. In any case, studying them would allow us to know more about this type of processes in neighboring galaxies"
Another possibility, closer, is that they could be native to the halo of our galaxy, and would have been accelerated and displaced inwards by the interaction with one of the dwarf galaxies that fell towards the galaxy. Milky Way during his training. Having additional information about the age and composition of the stars could help astronomers clarify their origin. "A halo star is probably pretty
old and consists mostly of hydrogen, while
stars from other galaxies could contain a lot of elements
heavier", Says another of the participants of this study, Tommaso Marchetti.
An undeniably curious finding that offers the strange world of fugitive stars an unexpected extension. Now we know that there are not only those that are leaving our star city, but others that seem to be reaching it from unknown depths. It would be curious to see the Milky Way in the skies of their hypothetical planets, while quickly and without anything can stop them, they rush towards that oasis of light in the darkness.
The positions and reconstructed orbits of 20 high-speed stars.
The seven shown in red move away from the Galaxy and may be traveling with the speed necessary to escape its gravity. Surprisingly, the study also revealed thirteen stars, shown in orange, that are directed towards the Milky Way.
Solitary inhabiting stars enter the galaxies also implies the existence of planets in such conditions. It is still overwhelming to imagine how their firmaments would be, surrounded by an infinite darkness studded with points of light, not of other stars, but of galaxies.
Gaia detects stars traveling between galaxies
SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM https://www.beviral.online
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