Astronomy Now wrote:
New computer simulations from the Georgia Institute of Technology provide a conclusive test for a hypothesis of why the centre of the Milky Way appears to be filled with young stars but has very few old ones. According to the theory, the remnants of older, red giant stars are still there — they just aren’t bright enough to be detected with telescopes.
The Georgia Tech simulations investigate the possibility that these red giants were dimmed after they were stripped of tens of percent of their mass millions of years ago during repeated collisions with an accretion disc at the galactic centre. The very existence of the young stars, seen in astronomical observations today, is an indication that such a gaseous accretion disc was present in the galactic centre because the young stars are thought to have formed from it as recently as a few million years ago.
The study is published in the June edition of The Astrophysical Journal. It is the first to run computer simulations on the theory, which was introduced in 2014...
Click to play embedded YouTube video.