Astronomers have newly discovered a relatively young, long band of stars in our galaxy, containing nearly 500 stars born at the same Time about 100 million years ago, a truly large Family.
Familiar star clusters are mostly globular star cluster structures. Astronomers have discovered that many stars are also clustered together in long bands in the Milky Way, and 8,292 such bands have been found in the Milky Way.
Astronomers have named these bands after Theia. Theia is the Titan goddess of vision and heavenly light in Greek mythology.
A new study has identified the “Theia 456” belt of 468 stars from the recently released Gaia satellite data. What’s even more peculiar is that they were all born almost simultaneously.
Most stars in globular clusters are born at the same time, but the Theia 456 stellar belt is long, with a more dispersed membership of 570 light-years long, said study co-author Jeff Andrews of Northwestern University. These stars move in the same direction through the galaxy.
The researchers say they found that all the stars in the Theia 456 belt have the same iron content, which means they were born at the same time about 100 million years ago and are relatively young. There are few similarly young, belt-dispersed star structures in its vicinity.
This is the first time scientists have discovered this stellar belt, as it is located in the galactic plane and is difficult to observe. The galactic plane is a region where a large number of stars are clustered, with about 400 billion stars.
The discovery was presented at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 15. Due to the plague, this session could only be held online.
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