Sloan Digital Sky Survey | 2015 July 30
When it comes to our galaxy, home is where the star is.[c][attachment=0]wanderingstars1.jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have created a new map of the Milky Way and determined that 30 percent of stars have dramatically changed their orbits. This discovery, published in yesterday's issue of The Astrophysical Journal, brings a new understanding of how stars are formed, and how they travel throughout our galaxy.
“In our modern world, many people move far away from their birthplaces, sometimes halfway around the world,” says Michael Hayden of New Mexico State University (NMSU), the lead author of the new study. “Now we’re finding the same is true of stars in our galaxy -- about 30 percent of the stars in our galaxy have traveled a long way from the orbits in which they were born.”
To build a map of the Milky Way, the scientists used the SDSS Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph to observe 100,000 stars during a 4-year campaign. ...
Chemical Cartography with APOGEE: Metallicity Distribution Functions
and the Chemical Structure of the Milky Way Disk - Michael R. Hayden et al
- Astrophysical Journal 808(2) 132 (2015 Aug 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/808/2/132
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1503.02110 > 07 Mar 2015