ESA
Scientists have achieved a rare feat: they were feasiblely measured the parameters of many young (and restless) stars at the same time.
The stars of the Milky Way tend to form in families, with stars similar to born more or less at the same place and more or less at the same time. Later, these stars, When they are ready to “get out of the nest”, They move away from their birthplace. While smaller groups can completely dissipate, larger families sisters usually move similarly and travel largely together.
We saw many star families with Gaia. Star chains have already been observed that extend through the Milky Way and remain intact for thousands of millions of years, astronomers have mapped the old stellar flows that rolled up to form the oldest structure of our galaxy and elaborated an “family portrait” of our cosmic home.
A family like no other
Using data from Gaia, scientists have now detected a family of stars other than all the others: a Massive family of over 1000 young stars with strange behavior. Despite its size, the family – called Ophion – will soon have dispersed completely and in record time, leaving only an empty nest behind.
“Ophion is full of stars that will spread through the galaxy in a totally random and uncoordinated way, which is far from expected from such a large family,” says WWU (Western Washington University), USA, and lead author of the scientific article on the discovery.
“In addition, this will happen in a time fraction which would usually take such a large family to disperse. It’s like no other stars family we have seen before. ”
A new model
To find Ophion, Dylan and his colleagues have developed a new model to explore the vast and incomparable set of gaia’s show and learn more about young and low mass stars that are reasonably near the sun. They applied this model, designated by Gaia Net, to the hundreds of millions of stellar specters published under Gaia’s version 3. Then they restricted their research to “young” stars under 20 million years – and Ophion jumped in sight.
“This is the first time you can use a model like this for young stars, due to the immense volume and the high quality of the spectroscopic observations needed to work it,” adds Johannes Sahlmann, ESA’s Gaia project scientist. “It’s still very young, the Possibility to feedly measure the parameters of many young stars at the same time. This type of mass observation is one of the truly unprecedented prowess of Gaia. ”
“Another is the way the Gaia Mission is creating opportunities for a new collaborative and interdisciplinary science through its Open Data policy. Several members of the Ophion discovery team are university students and postgraduate degree in computer sciences, who used Gaia data to innovate and develop new methods that are now providing new perspectives on Milky Way Stars.”
SOLVING THE MYSTERY
The question remains: Why does Ophion behave so unusual?
Scientists discuss several hypotheses. The star family lies about 650 light years away, near other large clusters of young stars; Energy events and interactions between these colossal neighbors may have influenced Ophion over the years.
There are also signs that stars have exploded here in the past. These Supernova Explosions They may have swept Ophion material and made their stars move much faster and more erratic than before.
“We do not know exactly what happened to this family of stars to behave this way, since We never found anything like. It’s a mystery, ”says co -author Marina Kounkel from the University of Northern Florida, USA.
“It’s exciting, because it changes the way we think about the groups of stars and how we can find them. Previous methods identified families grouping stars with similar movements, but Ophion would have escaped this network. Without the huge high quality sets of Gaia and the new models we can now use for them to analyze themwe could be losing a big piece of the stellar puzzle“.
After more than a decade to map our heavens, Gaia failed to observe in March. This marks the end of spacecraft operations – but it is only the beginning of science. There are many more discoveries in the coming years, along with Gaia’s largest data publications to date.
