Playing detective on a galactic scale
Lauren Fuge
Huge new dataset will solve Milky Way mysteries.
Night and day at the Anglo Australian Telescope. Credit: Ángel R. López-Sánchez / Australian Astronomical Optics / Macquarie University / ASTRO 3D
An Australian-led team of “galactic archaeologists” has just released the largest set of stellar chemical data ever compiled, containing information from 600,000 stars.
This new dataset will help astronomers solve many questions about the structure and evolution of the Milky Way, unravelling mysteries about star formation, chemical enrichment, migrations and galaxy mergers.
The 500GB of data is the result of 342 nights of observing over the last seven years by HERMES, a spectrograph attached to the Anglo Australian Telescope (AAT) in rural New South Wales. HERMES can collect light from more than 300 stars at once and separate out their light into spectra, from which astronomers discern the unique “fingerprints” of the chemical elements within the star.
“It’s a bit like a galactic version of the game Cluedo,” says Sven Buder, an astrophysicist from the Australian National University and a member of the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) collaboration.
“The chemical information we’ve gathered is rather like stellar DNA – we can use it to tell where each star has come from. We can also determine their ages and movements and furnish a deeper understanding of how the Milky Way evolved.”
More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/playing-detective-on-a-galactic-scale/
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