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Graveyard of Suns: Milky Way’s Galactic Underworld Discovered
The Milky Way is girdled by a gargantuan necropolis of ancient dead stars bigger than the galaxy itself.
BILLIONS OF black holes and neutron stars must have formed since our galaxy was born — but where they ended up is a mystery. A new study reveals where they lie, and that this previously hidden galactic boneyard is three times tall height of the Milky Way itself.
What’s more, the shape of this stellar tomb — dubbed the ‘galactic underworld’ by the astronomers who have drawn its first map — is radically different from that of the galaxy itself. And, in a surprising twist, almost a third of the corpses of these once massive suns have been flung out from the galaxy altogether.
“These compact remnants of dead stars show a fundamentally different distribution and structure to the visible galaxy,” said David Sweeney, a PhD student at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy of the University of Sydney, and lead author of a scientific paper in the of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The ‘height’ of the galactic underworld is over three times larger in the Milky Way itself,” he added. “And an amazing 30 percent of objects have been completely ejected from the galaxy.”
