Galactic Collision May Have Caused Solar Baby Boom
As galaxies age, they exhaust their supplies of star-forming gases, this means that they slowly begin to produce fewer stars at a linear rate. This slow, steadily declining stellar formation rate is not what we see in our galaxy, the Milky Way, however. A team of astronomers from Spain found that over half of the stars that form the Milky Way's disk are between two and three billion years old - a strange and sudden spike of new stars being created all around the same period of time as the rate of star formation jumped.
The only way for such a sudden burst to occur would be for the galaxy to have received a large, abrupt influx of star-making material. The team believes that another, smaller satellite galaxy ended up colliding with the Milky Way, and providing its disk with new gases, that fueled the new burst of stellar activity, is the most likely culprit. The scientists were able to determine the ages of approximately 3 million stars by using their color, distances, and luminosity data, obtained by Gaia, the European Space Agency's satellite.
Read more: http://rsci.nl/982
Image: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
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