Life is unpredictable, and often we don’t know when a new adventure is coming. It could be that the adventure requires us to move to another city or even to a new country.
Guess. You’re not alone: Stars do too!
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Stars in the Andromeda Galaxy as observed by DESI in the 4 meter Mayall Telescope. Each dot in the photo represents the stars in M31, from blue to stars moving toward the observer to red, to stars moving away from the observer. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/AURA/NSF/E. Slawik/D. de Martin/M. age
” data-medium-file=” data-large-file=” decoding=”async” width=”1000″ height=”750″ alt=”The stars in the Andromeda Galaxy observed by DESI in the 4 meter Mayall Telescope. Each dot in the photo represents the stars in M31, from blue to stars moving toward the observer to red, to stars moving away from the observer. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/AURA/NSF/E. Slawik/D. de Martin/M. Zamani” class=”wp-image-35884″ srcset=” 1000w, 300w, 768w, 67w, 870w” sizes=”(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px” data-recalc-dims=”1″/>
For the first time, a team of astronomers from NOIRLab found new clues showing stars moving into the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s closest neighbor. Same as a flock of migratory birds to new locations to obtain food and shelter.
Over billions of years galaxies grow and evolve. And during that process, new stars are formed. Sometimes two galaxies collide and eventually merge to form a new galaxy. Scientists call this process galactic immigration.
By studying the motion of each star through the galaxy and its halo, astronomers can trace the roots of galactic immigration events. For example, where did the stars in one galaxy come from, how did they move to other galaxies, and so on. Previously, studies like this could only be done in the Milky Way, our galaxy.
Now astronomers can do similar studies for nearby galaxies like Andromeda. They make observations with Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) which is installed on teleskop 4-meter Nicholas U. Mayall at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
Astronomers measured nearly 7,500 stars in the Andromeda Galaxy’s inner halo and found patterns that could confirm that these stars came from other galaxies. Not only that, the team of astronomers also found that the migration of galaxies occurred about 2 billion years ago.
After finding this historic evidence, astronomers now aim to explore more of the stars that are on the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy. In this way they can study the structure and travel of stars between galaxies in greater detail.
Cool Facts
Did you know that most of the stars in the Milky Way’s halo formed in other galaxies? Those stars migrated into the Milky Way when their home galaxy collided and merged with ours 8-10 billion years ago. Galaxies like the Milky Way were built by smaller galaxies in the cosmos over billions of years.
Source: This article is a republished version developed from Indonesian edition of Space Scoop Universe Awareness. The Indonesian edition of Space Scoop is translated by Langitselatan.
