Have you ever heard of the dark side of the moon, well, scientists have already found a dark side of our galaxy that we had no knowledge of. Scientists were working on a new map of the Milky Way when they came across a galactic underworld filled with the remains of massive dead stars.
A new diagram of corpses of once massive stars revealed a graveyard within our galaxy that’s three times bigger than the Milky Way. When stars about 8 times the mass of our sun run out of their fuel they collapse and blow apart in what’s called a supernova explosion which eventually turns them into either a neutron or a black hole. Newly formed stars and black holes in the Milky Way are easier to locate because they stay within our galaxy and conform to its shape whereas the case is different with ancient stars that existed when the milky way was still young and evolving and they were like stellar ghost stars when scientists tried to find them. The supernova explosion that triggered the collapse of the stars actually kicked them out into interstellar space.
Scientists have discovered that 30% of those stellar remnants have been kicked out of the galaxy completely according to the research published by the journal monthly notices of ‘The royal astronomical society’ but the research team working on this new map was able to locate where the stellar remnants rest around our galaxy and recreating the life cycle of those ancient stars.
Author David Sweeney, a doctoral student at the Sydney institute for astronomy explained “The hardest problem I had to solve in hunting down their true distribution was to account for the ‘kicks’ they receive in the violent moments of their creation. Supernova explosions are asymmetric, and the remnants are ejected at high speed – up to millions of kilometers per hour – and, even worse, this happens in an unknown and random direction for every object.”
In order to find out the exact location of these dead stars, the team of researchers had to look deep in the depth of the cosmic time and use some very complex models to construct how they behave in billion of years therefore the researchers compared it to a snooker-like table where you might be able to find out where t ball went depending on how hard it was hit and how was it hit.