ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently spotted the Milky Way’s central region and revealed new details about our galaxy’s rich history. With these observations, astronomers found evidence of a burst of star formation that generated over 100,000 supernova explosions in the Milky Way’s past.
A study published in Nature Astronomy details the team’s Milky Way investigation. The astronomers discovered that roughly 80 percent of the stars in the Milky Way’s central region formed during the early years of our galaxy (between 8 and 13.5 billion years ago).
This first period of star formation was followed by approximately six billion years of very little activity. This timeframe ended with a strong burst of star formation that took place around one billion years ago. So, star formation was not continuous in our galaxy.
“The conditions in the studied region during this burst of activity must have resembled those in ‘starburst’ galaxies, which form stars at rates of more than 100 solar masses per year,” says Nogueras-Lara, who is now based at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “This burst of activity, which must have resulted in the explosion of more than a hundred thousand supernovae, was probably one of the most energetic events in the whole history of the Milky Way.”
The image above is the first release of the Galactic Nucleus survey, which depended on ESO’s VLT to generate sharp details of the Milky Way’s central region. Over three million stars were studied during the survey.
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