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A team of astronomers from MITthree ancient stars orbiting the Milky Way's halo. The team thinks these stars formed when the Universe was around a billion years old and that they were once part of a smaller galaxy that was consumed by the Milky Way.
MIT astronomers discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe, and they live in our own galactic neighborhood. The stars are in the Milky Way's 'halo' – the cloud of stars that envelopes the main galactic disk – and they appear to have formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, when the very first galaxies were taking shape.
On completion of their analysis , the team identified that the stars had very low levels of strontium and barium as predicted if they were ancient stars. The team decided to analyse the orbital characteristics of the stars to see how they moved. The stars were all in different locations through the Milky Way's halo and all thought to be about 30,000 light years from Earth.
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Universe’s oldest known stars found in Milky Way’s ‘halo’Laura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
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