Elements of life discovered everywhere in the Milky Way
But not every location was created equal.
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” -Douglas Adams
For a long time, humanity has known that the raw ingredients for life weren’t created at the same time as the Universe, but rather needed to be created, over time, from previous generations of stars. Measuring and mapping the abundances of the individual stars within the Milky Way has previously been impossible, due to the colossal amount of data that one would need to collect and analyze to create such a map, as well as the difficulty in seeing through the dust and matter in the galactic plane. But thanks to years of dedicated observations with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s APOGEE infrared spectroscopic survey, such a map is now possible. And quite to the delight of many, they find that the galactic center may have been hospitable to life far before our location in the Milky Way became so.
