A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky¹ Way's disc -- the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy² its 'flying saucer' shape. By tracking the fast-produced elements, specifically magnesium³ in this study, astronomers⁴ can determine how rapidly different parts of the Milky Way were formed. The research suggests that stars in the inner regions of the Galactic disc were the first to form, supporting ideas that our Galaxy grew from the inside-out.

 

Using data from the 8-m VLT in Chile, one of the world's largest telescopes, an international team of astronomers took detailed⁵ observations of stars with a wide range of ages and locations in the Galactic disc to accurately⁶ determine their 'metallicity': the amount of chemical elements in a star other than hydrogen and helium, the two elements most stars are made from.

 

Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe consisted almost entirely⁷ of hydrogen and helium, with levels of "contaminant metals" growing over time. Consequently, older stars have fewer elements in their make-up -- so have lower metallicity.

 

"The different chemical elements of which stars -- and we -- are made are created at different rates -- some in massive stars which live fast and die young, and others in sun-like stars with more sedate⁸ multi-billion-year lifetimes," said Professor Gerry Gilmore, lead investigator⁹ on the Gaia-ESO Project.

 

Massive stars, which have short lives and die as 'core-collapse supernovae', produce huge amounts of magnesium during their explosive death throes. This catastrophic event can form a neutron¹⁰ star or a black hole, and even trigger the formation of new stars.

 

The team have shown that older, 'metal-poor' stars inside the Solar Circle -- the orbit of our Sun around the centre of the Milky Way, which takes roughly 250 million years to complete -- are far more likely to have high levels of magnesium. The higher level of the element inside the Solar Circle suggests this area contained more stars that "lived fast and die young" in the past.

 

The stars that lie in the outer regions of the Galactic disc -- outside the Solar Circle -- are predominantly（主要地） younger, both 'metal-rich' and 'metal-poor', and have surprisingly low magnesium levels compared to their metallicity.

 

This discovery signifies important differences in stellar evolution across the Milky Way disc, with very efficient and short star formation timescales occurring inside the Solar Circle; whereas, outside the Sun's orbit, star formation took much longer.

 

"We have been able to shed new light on the timescale of chemical enrichment across the Milky Way disc, showing that outer regions of the disc take a much longer time to form," said Maria Bergemann from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, who led the study.

 

"This supports theoretical models for the formation of disc galaxies¹¹ in the context of Cold Dark Matter cosmology（宇宙论）, which predict that galaxy discs grow inside-out."

 

The findings offer new insights into the assembly history of our Galaxy, and are the part of the first wave of new observations from the Gaia-ESO survey, the ground-based extension to the Gaia space mission -- launched by the European Space Agency at the end of last year -- and the first large-scale survey conducted on one the world's largest telescopes: the 8-m VLT in Paranal, Chile.

 

The study is published online today through the astronomical¹² database Astro-ph, and has been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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