Young stars have been found in an old part of our galaxy
HONOLULU – A cluster of young stars in the Milky Way is hanging out where it seemingly shouldn’t exist. Our galaxy is enveloped in an extensive halo of old stars and hot gas — gas which can’t cool down enough to clump together and form new stars. And yet, a flock of relatively new stars is hurtling through the halo, researchers reported January 7 during a news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The star cluster is about 120 million years old and sits about 94,000 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers found it by sifting through data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite for young stars clumped together and moving in the same direction across the sky. The cluster “didn’t have time to form somewhere else, so it was probably born near where we see it,” said Adrian Price-Whelan, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “But how did it form there, where there’s very little cold...