Astronomers find Milky Way galaxy’s most-distant stars

Astronomers have detected, in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits, a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy – almost halfway to a neighbouring galaxy.

The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the remotest reaches of the Milky Way’s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year: 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

“This study is redefining what constitutes the outer limits of our galaxy,” co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, said in a press release. “Our galaxy and Andromeda are both so big, there’s hardly any space between the two galaxies.”

These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

The most distant one appears to have a mass of about 70 percent that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.

 

‘Born in halos’

The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.

“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged – or more straightforwardly, cannibalised – by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event.”

“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies – by eating its own kind,” co-author GuhaThakurta said.

Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and the central bulge that are teeming with stars.

The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its centre about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion to 400 billion stars, including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5 percent of the galaxy’s stars.

Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.

The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy.

“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended – and are almost ‘back-to-back’,” Feng said.