The Dark Energy Survey just revealed some entirely new ideas and origins of many of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
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(Caption - Messier 101 outer halo & Stellar Streams Image credit: Joint Imaging Team)
Dark Energy the mysterious energy that's pushing everything further away even expanding the universe at speed more than the speed of light just made some headlines. It's been so long that astrophysicists are trying to look and understand the composition of dark energy that so significantly influences the overall universe.
(Distribution of galaxy velocities casued by Dark Energy in Local Supercluster GIF credit: GIPHY)
Dark Energy so mysterious the way it works that we don't even know how to exactly look for them but theoretically they should exist.
With hope to detect the mysteries with our current level of clever understanding and techniques we've built extremely precise sensitive telescopes and point them to the night sky with hope to detect at least a bit that we might not had seen before.
(GIF credit: NASA)
So sky gazing extra sensitive telescopes on the hunt for the unusuals found something unexpected. The process of looking for Dark Energy is called Dark Energy Survey huh cool name for the mysterious energy hunt you wonder.
Impression of the Milky Way Image credit: NASA)
So recently the Dark Energy Survey while surveying unexpectedly found out that our galaxy The Milky Way house to billions of stars, a bunch of those stars weren't born in the Milky Way. Instead they landed on here in the Milky Way's gravitational well and now is a part of the Milky Way.
(Full area of sky mapped by the Dark Energy Survey and the 11 newly discovered stellar streams. Four of the streams in this diagram — ATLAS, Molonglo, Phoenix and Tucana III – were previously known. The others were discovered using the Dark Energy Camera, one of the most powerful astronomical cameras on Earth. Image credit: Dark Energy Survey)
(Animation of several of the newly discovered Stellar Streams GIF credit: Dark Energy Survey)
In the picture above look at those dim paths which are called Stellar Streams which are like little paths in the realm of galaxy, the stars that migrated took those path ways to migrate into the Milky Way and those dim lighted path ways are the traces of their comings.
(GIF of full area of sky mapped by the Dark Energy Survey GIF credit: Dark Energy Survey)
(This is a portion of the sky mapped by the Dark Energy Survey. Stellar Streams (including ones previously found) can be seen as yellow, blue and red streaks. Image credit: Dark Energy Survey)
We know about Stellar Streams for a long now but this is the first time we got to see them in existence and it's pretty cool.
Stellar Streams forms when smallar galaxies wander by too close to a galaxy like in this case the Milky Way, the total gravity of the two close by galaxies causes stars on the edge of the galaxy to swirl out, the region of weak gravity influence on the stars, they start to escape with the attraction of the other galaxy and lock in their gravitational well and in that process they form halos.
Stars are generally born in regions of dense gas and dust part of galaxy like stellar nurseries. Astronomers just strengthened their process of learning all about family tree of different stars here and there how and where they were born.
(Milky Way with the locations of known sites of massive star formation outside the Galactic Centre region. The size of the red circles indicates the luminosity of the star-forming regions. The small white circle indicates the position of the Solar System and the various identified spiral arms are labelled. Image credit: NASA)
These types of stellar nurseries exists all over the arms of Milky Way where most of the stars are born like our sun did 5 billion years ago.
There are billions of other galaxies out there with their own stellar nurseries out of which some of the million stars or so might had slipped out of their gravity wells to ours and that brings a lots of possibilities and opportunities to learn about those stars and their different combinations of elements and composition which might open a whole new set of keys of the unknowns.
(The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile houses the Dark Energy Camera. Image credit: Fermilab)
The next Dark Energy Survey is going to start operating in 2022 and that will be even more advanced and sensitive to find out more deeply and precisely the quarky mysteries in the wonders.
You might like to read my previous articles on How a New Form of Matter Discovered
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