A team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy were able to identify the Milky Way's "poor old heart," which is the number of stars that have been present in the Milky Way's core since its formation. Milky Way Map: Heart Circled Our parent galaxy, the Milky Way

A team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy were able to identify the "poor old heart" of the Milky Way , which is the number of stars that have been present in the Milky Way's core since its formation.

Map of the Milky Way: Heart in a Circle

Our parent galaxy, the Milky Way, formed over the past 13 billion years and is nearly as large as the universe. Over the past few decades, astronomers have successfully reconstructed many phases of the Milky Way's history, and their methods are not that different from the dates used by archaeologists.

For example, by excavating ancient cities, scientists can determine which buildings were built earlier and which were built later. This explains the location of the buildings (logically, the Kremlin's surroundings are the oldest areas of Moscow), as well as the materials or methods used to build them. In this regard, "space archaeologists" have taken a similar approach, determining the age of stars through their chemical composition and location.

To reconstruct the history of the Milky Way from the beginning, researchers from the Max Planck Society in Germany determined the ages of thousands of known subgiants. This allowed them to "look back" 11 billion years to when the Milky Way merged with an dwarf galaxy, , discovered in 2018.

Because older stars contain quite a lot of heavy elements, astronomers speculate that they were not the first stars in history, but that there were generations of earlier stars before they exploded. This is consistent with the hypothesis that before the formation of the Milky Way, three or four kinds of protogalaxies were adjacent and eventually merged together. They became the heart of the Milky Way, preserved in the center of the Milky Way, where scientists eventually found it.

It turns out that, as the researchers suspected, the "poor old heart of the Milky Way" is located about 30,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way and represents a group of metal-poor stars that are more than 122.5 billion years old.

Perhaps by obtaining more data, scientists can even determine which galaxy each star originated from, and thus determine the origin of the entire Milky Way.

The research was published in the Astronomical Journal.