The Milky Way’s thick disk is 2 billion years older than astronomers previously predicted, so it is possible that it formed barely 800 million years after the big bang.
Our galaxy can be divided into four parts: a thin disk that contains the solar system and most of the stars; In addition to a thicker disc that is much rarer, larger and older.
To reconstruct the history of these components, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, A special species called suboria has been studied.
Sub-stars are stars that have managed to get a lens between their normal life cycle and the stage of their transformation into a red giant, at which time intense merger begins.
Since the sub-stage of a star’s life only lasts a few million years, computer models of its evolution can be used to trace the process, rather than a display to compare their chemical composition, This also determines their exact age.
The researchers used the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission and the Large Sky Region Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) to determine the true age of 250,000 sub-branches in the Milky Way. and the in her contacts.
From the data, we learned that in the history of the Milky Way, star formation occurred in two different waves. The first, related to the thick disk, began only 13 million years after the Big Bang, about 13 billion years ago, and accelerated 2 billion years later when a nascent galaxy collided with another, experts called only Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.
This collision could have filled the entire Milky Way’s thick disk and stellar network with stars, but it would have taken another 5-6 billion years for the Sun to form into the thin disk, the next big wave of formation.
