Astronomers have found a vast “cemetery” of dead stars that extends three times the height of the Milky Way, reported RT.
The first map of the “galactic underworld” revealed a group of suns that were once huge, and collapsed to turn into black holes and neutron stars, and these small, dark objects are scattered in our galaxy, like cosmic graves..
The map shows the remnants of the suns forming a “cemetery” that extends three times the height of the Milky Way, where regarding a third of the ancient dead bodies are expelled from the galaxy..
For the first time, scientists discovered that many objects that were inside our galaxy were thrown outside it.
Dr David Sweeney, a student at the University of Sydney’s Sydney Institute of Astronomy and lead author of the research paper, said: ‘These compact remnants of dead stars show a fundamentally different distribution and structure from the visible galaxy (the Milky Way as we see it).“.
He added: “The height of the underworld is three times greater than that of the Milky Way itself. And 30% of the objects have been completely expelled from the galaxy.”“.
Although billions of stars have formed since the galaxy was young, the strange corpses (stellar remnants) have been hurled into the darkness of interstellar space by the supernova that created them. Thus, it has been hiding out of the sight of astronomers until now.
By recreating the entire life cycle of ancient dead stars, scientists have created the first detailed map showing where stellar bodies have been.
Neutron stars and newly formed black holes match the shape of a galaxy today, so astronomers know where to look. But the oldest neutron stars and black holes “are like ghosts that still haunt a long-demolished house, so they are hard to find.”“.
“One of the problems with finding these ancient objects is that until now we had no idea where to look,” said Peter Tuthill of the Sydney Institute of Astronomy and co-author of the paper. “The oldest neutron stars and black holes arose when the galaxy was younger and formed differently. Then it underwent complex changes spanning billions of years“.
By building a complex model that takes into account all the intricacies of the movement of stars through space, the “underworld” version of the Milky Way looks very different from what we see.
In the maps created, the distinct spiral arms of the Milky Way in the “galactic underworld” version disappear entirely due to the age of most of the remnants, and the hazy effects of energetic ejection from the supernovae they created..
Even more intriguingly, the side view shows that the “galactic underworld is more puffy” than the Milky Way we know today, as a result of kinetic energy achieved by supernovae that form a halo around the visible Milky Way..
