Mysterious 'ancient heart' of the Milky Way discovered using Gaia probe

The original, ancient nucleus of our universe may have been discovered by Astrophysicists.

The first stars of a young galaxy can be found in the constellation Sagittarius, which is more than 12 billion years old. The group is a small part of the total mass of the universe. The findings were published on the preprint server arXiv but are yet to be peer reviewed.

The astronomer used data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia observatory to find the primordial group of stars.

Scientists found the largest galaxy ever.

It has been thought for a long time that the oldest stars are at the center of a galaxy. According to Hans-Walter Rix, the lead author of the study, they have shown them to be there in large numbers. It is similar to archeology in an old city. The oldest ruins are at the modern city center.

The most crowded part of the universe, the central bulge, was the first place to look for the ancient heart.

The researchers pulled together data from 2 million stars that sat within 30 degrees of the galactic center to find stars with low metal content. In a universe that was not yet filled with heavy metals, stars like this one were born.

Smaller dwarf galaxies that smashed into and merged with our galaxy may have brought metal-poor stars to the Milky Way. The researchers were able to separate the stars that formed the ancient heart from the stars that originated in a dwarf galaxy by examining their paths through space.

Researchers estimate that the population of stars around the Milky Way is between 50 million and 200 million times larger than our own sun. The rest of the stars are 1.5 times lighter than the sun.

Half of the stellar mass is made up of these stars. Half of the stars from the early universe are still alive to this day.

Two things were revealed by the examination of the ancient heart.

The close bunch of stars in the center of the Milky Way points to its core not having been invaded by other galaxies.

Rix said that the Milky Way hasn't been shook up dramatically. Our universe has been a sheltered place.