Scientists have found interesting evidence that the star group closest to the Sun is very disturbed. This prediction, reported in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveals that this group encountered a massive structure not seen hundreds of millions of years ago. That’s when the rift started.
That star group is called Hyades. It is located 153 light-years away, and is seen as a V-shaped orbit of stars at the end of the Taurus constellation. Telescopes have revealed many more stars, and this group of stars is connected by a graph of about 60 light-years across. But the group used to have thousands more stars, according to the new work.
Using the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, astronauts around the world have been able to create the most accurate maps of the stars in the Milky Way. Thanks to precise positioning and distance, researchers can work out not only where stars are but also where they were and where they will be.
Thanks to this, the team working on Hyades was able to see something never seen before in star clusters: tidal tails. In a crash between galleries, we often see some of the material arrange itself in a long tail stretching from one object to another. This was believed to be true for star collections as well. Some stars will be pushed forward due to the gravitational effects of other stars, while others will stay behind.
Thanks to computer models mimicking the cluster and the data from Gaia, the team was able to identify these tidal tails in a star browser for the first time, finding thousands of most popular stars. formerly a browser, now stretching over 2,600 light-year tails. of length.
Suddenly though, there are far fewer stars in a tidal tail than expected. The team believes that this is not a case of a slowly declining 700-million-year-old group – the browser must have hit something big.
“There may have been a close interaction with this horrible lump, and the Hyades just broke up,” ESA Research lead author Tereza Jerabkova said in a statement.
At present, there is no clear suspicion. A huge gas cloud or other star cluster could be responsible, but nothing nearby can be identified as the culprit. Another possibility is that this was caused by a sub-halo of dark material. Dark matter remains the yet to be tested material that is intended to circulate and reside in galleries. It is invisible but very large, so it could end up in a large scattered clump, and interact with the star group.
More ideas are needed, but the work shows just how effective Gaia ‘s role has been in expanding our understanding of the galaxy.
“With Gaia, the way we see the Sweet Trail has changed completely. And with these findings, we will be able to map the infrastructure of the Milky Way much better than ever before, ”said Dr Jerabkova.