Birth of the Milky Way

For the first time, a team of astronomers has succeeded in investigating the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way. The scientists, from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University and the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, deduce that the early Galaxy went from smooth to clumpy in just a few hundred million years.The team publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Led by Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa, the researchers looked at the spherical groups of stars (globular clusters) that lie in the halo of the Milky Way, outside the more familiar spiral arms where the Sun is found. They each contain hundreds of thousands of stars and are thought to have formed at the same time as the ‘proto-Galaxy’ that eventually evolved into the Galaxy we see today.

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