In the first survey of its kind, an international team of more than 50 astronomers have identified more than 100,000 sites of stellar origin in 90 galaxies in the universe.
Star nurseries – or “star nurseries” – are areas of space where stars are born. Experts note that each nursery can spawn thousands of new stars over its lifetime — and now, researchers have an atlas with maps of more than 100,000 of them. “These nurseries are responsible for building galaxies and making planets, and they’re just an important part of the story of how we got here,” Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University in the US, who led the research and He said in a statement.
With the map, the researchers are looking to trace stars back to the stellar nurseries where they formed, to understand their formation process in greater detail – along with a better understanding of each existing star.
Think of a star nursery as solid gas Space area with ideal conditions stars to form. Basically, they are extremely cold and dense clouds of gas and dust compressed by the gravitational force of space – even a process nuclear fusion Who is guarding the stars begins. However, the process can take millions of years.
Until now, scientists thought all stellar nurseries looked the same — a belief that seems to have been undermined by the new survey. “We used to think that all stellar nurseries in every galaxy would look more or less the same, but this survey reveals that this is not the case, and stellar nurseries change from place to place,” Leroy said.
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The research also leads scientists to understand that the location of the nursery – or “environment” – plays an important role in the birth of stars. “These observations have taught us that ‘neighborhood’ has a small but clear effect on where and how many stars are born,” said Eva Schinnerer, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who co-authored the study. He told the press.
The astronomers presented their research at the American Astronomical Society’s summer meeting last week. is inside arXivThe collaborative research carried out by scientists from around the world that led to the creation of the atlas, is currently awaiting peer review.
Researchers hope discovering the origin of stars will help us better understand stars and galaxies as well. “To understand how stars form, we need to relate the birth of a star to its place in the universe. It is like connecting a person to his home, neighborhood, city and region. If a galaxy represents a city, then its neighbors are spiral arms, homes are star-forming units, and the nearest galaxy is a neighboring city in the region, Shenrer added.
The researchers believe that the atlas will also guide them to better gauge the intricacies of the universe — and provide greater insight into how star nurseries are created as star-forming chambers.
“[I]This is a big step towards understanding where we come from. While we now know that stellar nurseries vary from place to place, we still don’t know why or how these differences affect the formation of stars and planets,” said Adam LeRoy, adding “a question we hope to answer in the near future.” “
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