Social distancing for Milky Way? Our galaxy is flinging stars to the edge!
Representative image.
The home to our solar system and many more celestial objects is now flinging stars away from itself. Researchers recently found that the Milky Way galaxy is pushing stars farther away from itself.
The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society recently released simulations depicting how this was happening. Explosions from dying stars are sending stars across the galaxy.
Flung from the centre of the Milky Way, such events demonstrate how the galaxy is continuously evolving and expanding.
"The FIRE-2 simulations allow us to generate movies that make it seem as though you're observing a real galaxy," said Sijie Yu, lead author of the study in a press release.
"They show us that as the galaxy centre is rotating, a bubble driven by supernova feedback is developing with stars forming at its edge. It looks as though the stars are being kicked out from the centre”, Yu added.
The stars are being flung towards the outer halo of the Milky Way. However, studies show that besides switching locations, stars are also restructuring and reforming during the process, as they leave the innards of the Galaxy.
"In plots that compare data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission,which provides a 3D velocity chart of stars in the Milky Way,with other maps that show stellar density and metallicity, we can see structures similar to those produced by outflow stars in our simulations”, Yu further said.
The Milky Way galaxycontains between 100 and 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets.