An international team of astronomers has discovered a huge empty space at the center of our galaxy, almost completely devoid of young stars. This interstellar desert stretches nearly 8,000 light-years from the galactic core and, according to scientists, has not produced new stars for the past hundreds of millions of years.
In an article published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a group of astronomers led by Noriyuki Matsunagi of the University of Tokyo describe their observations of a remarkably devastated part of our galaxy, called the stellar void. The analysis of scientists shows that the galactic inner disk of our galaxy is actually completely devoid of new stars, and, most likely, this state of affairs has been going on for more than one hundred million years.
Our galaxy contains billions of young and old stars. And according to scientists, if you measure the level of their distribution, then this will bring huge benefits to understanding how our galaxy appeared and developed. One of the classes of the youngest stars in our galaxy is called the Cepheid. Their age ranges from 10 to 300 million years (our Sun, recall, is already 4.6 billion years old). Cepheids are relatively easy to spot due to their vibrant pulsation. And based on this pulsation, astronomers can calculate the approximate distance to them, as well as their age.
The distribution of young Cepheid stars is shown by dots. Aside from a small patch in the galactic center itself, a space of about 8,000 light years is virtually devoid of stars.
It should be noted that, despite the simplicity of searching for Cepheids in other regions of space, the process of finding them in the inner part of the Milky Way is very complicated. This is due to the fact that the galactic center, as a rule, is covered by dense clouds of gas and dust, which do not allow looking inside. Nevertheless, a powerful near-infrared telescope installed in South Africa helped Matsunage and his team to look behind such a dense veil. It came as a surprise to scientists that there are practically no Cepheids in the center of the galaxy.
Previous observations by astronomers have shown the presence of several Cepheids in the galactic center of the Milky Way in a radius of about 150 light years. However, the new study is making it clear that beyond this region extends a "completely lifeless space void" about 8,000 light-years from the center. Given that the entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, it’s easy to see that this is a very huge empty space.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK
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