According to a study published on Thursday, reports AFP and Agerpres.

These two ordered, rotating “stellar streams,” each with a mass of 10 million suns, are like the “first building blocks” of the ancient heart of the Milky Way, the place where the first stars were born before the galaxy grew and faded. about the current shape of the spiral, Hyati Malhan of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany told AFP.

“This is the first time we have been able to identify fragments of this protogalaxy,” the lead author of the study, which was published in The Astrophysical, detailed Shakti and Shiva after the Hindu gods, “whose union gave rise to the cosmos.” Magazine.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia probe, which has been operating for 10 years at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, produced in 2022 a 3D map of the position and motion of more than 1.8 billion stars.

This map identified a population of stars nicknamed the “poor old heart” because of their advanced age, defined by low metallicity (a chemical indicator of a star’s age), and their central location.

This is an important milestone for galactic archaeology, which aims to reconstruct different eras in the history of the Milky Way “just as archaeologists reconstruct the history of a city,” the Max Planck Institute explained in a statement.

Amazing discovery of astronomers regarding the evolution of the Milky Way

Thus, according to the institute, the model of the evolution of the Milky Way envisages “an old central city surrounded by newer districts.” But “the further we go back in time and space, the more dim the picture of galactic history,” noted Khyati Malkhan.

Therefore, astronomers analyzed this archaic heart identified in 2022. They used a sample of 6 million stars whose chemical composition and position they studied with the help of artificial intelligence. They also identified two “stellar currents”, Shakti and Shiva, which formed 12-13 billion years ago, in the early stages of the Milky Way.

Surprisingly, the stars of which they are composed have an anomalously high metallicity for such a large age. This is probably a sign that indicates their creation by an earlier generation of stars. As it died, this generation released chemical elements that “seeded” the interstellar gas from which Shakti and Shiva were born.

“Shedding light on the infancy of our galaxy is one of Gaia’s soon-to-be-completed missions,” said Timo Prusti, ESA project scientist. Even if “finding the original embryo” of the Milky Way will be difficult, Hyati Malkhan added.

PHOTO Article: Panom Bounak, Dreamstime.com.