Ancient graveyards and cemeteries have proved to be an excellent source of information about
the past hopefully this trend holds on larger scales as astronomers have just discovered a
massive necropolis of stars spreading out from the alive and bright spiraled arms of the Milky Way
when we want to learn about the life of someone or something that has long been dead looking towards
their burial place is often a great place to start astronomers have found the Milky Way's massive
Stellar graveyard and hope that studying it will give them more clues about our Galaxy's past
when we look up at the sky at night we can see thousands if not millions
of stars dotting nearly every inch of the sky all of these stars are burning
their fuel and are at some point in their lives between birth and death
we know that stars are born from gas and dust coalescing together and that
when they reach the end of their lives they can die in brilliant supernovas
but what happens to the mass of the star after it dies
astronomers have discovered a massive graveyard surrounding the Milky Way in which an insane
number of Stellar remnants from the Galaxy spiral arms are flying through Interstellar space
stars begin their journey within massive clouds of dust and gas floating out in
space after enough matter is clumped together to generate a strong enough gravitational
force the star will ignite and the process of nuclear fusion within its core Roars to life
depending on the size of the star and how much fuel it holds they can burn for as short
of a time as several hundred million years for massive stars that burn hot and bright
while smaller stars like our red dwarf Sun can live for tens if not hundreds of billions of years
when stars contain at least eight times the mass of our sun they can explode in a supernova event
to form a super dense object if the star is massive enough at least 25 times the mass
of our sun a supernova will lead to the star's core forming a black hole these monsters have
a gravitational force strong enough to warp the very fabric of space-time punching a hole in our
universe Singularity by definition right now is the location where the laws of physics as
we currently understand them break down for us the black hole is the end of space the End of Time the
end of everything but if the star lacks the mass needed to generate that level of gravitational
energy it won't collapse entirely and instead will form a neutron star neutron stars are named such
because their gravitational force generated is so powerful that it squeezes electrons
and protons together on the subatomic level and forces them to form neutrons these stars are the
densest objects in our universe just one teaspoon of its matter will weigh upwards of 4 billion tons
foreign the Milky Way was formed over 13 billion years ago less than 1 billion years
after the big bang in that time billions of neutron stars have formed and been ejected
out into Interstellar space some of them lost to the Milky Way forever in order to create a
map of the Milky Way's underworld astronomers meticulously recreated the full life cycles of
stars going back to the beginning of the Galaxy's life from these Recreations they were able to
simulate their path after they were ejected but this was not like mapping a simple ball flying
through the air the forces from the Supernova can cause them to be flung out of their system
at speeds reaching millions of kilometers an hour at nearly unpredictable trajectories these
neutron stars are blasting through space with no friction or air resistance meaning that they
only slow down when influenced by a large gravitational pull like that of our galaxy
by following their paths the team was able to find
the majority of the neuron star's final resting places
rap is the result of a massive star blowing up as a supernova when it runs out of fuel in its core
and then the debris gets blown out and keeps expanding into space
it turns out that an estimated 30 percent of all neutron stars created in the Milky Way
have been ejected from the Galaxy's influence entirely flying through Intergalactic space for
eternity one interesting finding in this study showed that statistically the closest one of
these neutron stars should only be 65 light years away from Earth
that is right in our backyard in Galactic terms
nothing ever sits still in the universe for long and astronomers had to work hard to reconstruct
the movements of these Stellar remnants over billions of years but after painstakingly
mapping out the enormous number of neutron stars that have been kicked out of our galaxy by their
own supernovas they create a galactic map that shows a brand-new angle of our galaxy looking at
them side by side you can see how the graveyard surrounding the Milky Way completely changes its
shape and the Milky Way's characteristic spiral arms completely vanish instead the Stellar
remnants caused the Milky Way to appear puffed up when viewed from the side they also determined
that some of the neutron stars were kicked out of the Galaxy with such force that they broke free of
the Galaxy's gravitational force altogether and flew free into Intergalactic space gone forever
the supernovas that give birth to neutron stars or black holes are asymmetric explosions making the
paths extremely hard to follow as the remnants are kicked out into Interstellar space these
erratic trajectories are responsible for the horde of neutron stars washing out the Milky
Way's unique form it came as quite a shock to the astronomers studying the graveyard who expected
the underworld to be subtly different from the Milky Way But found a much more radical change
in form they found that the younger newly formed neutron stars conform much more to the form of
today's Galaxy while the ancient neutron stars are still haunting the outer reaches of the graveyard
the galactic underworld actually spans quite a bit larger than the
bright star-filled Galaxy that we are used to seeing neutron stars spread out forming a
puffy Halo formation surrounding the Galaxy that measures roughly three
times the height of the Milky Way does every Galaxy have a graveyard like this
now that astronomers have developed the methods and Technologies to study and map the galactic
underworld there are many plans to go hunting for more and keep improving the understanding
of the universe the mysteries of the universe are slowly beginning to be unraveled and understood,
it's only a matter of time until the next big Discovery is made in space thanks for watching
leave us a comment down below and let us know what recent space discovery made you go wow
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