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LiveScience
LiveScience
Patrick Pester

Group of ancient stars spotted near the sun could rewrite the Milky Way's history

The area of stars sampled by new Gaia mission data. Our sun is located in the middle of the contours, while the red region surrounding it covers the stars for which there are reliable age estimates.

Ancient stars located surprisingly near to our sun formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang — suggesting part of the Milky Way is much older than previously thought, a study has found. 

Most stars, including the sun, are located in a thin disk rotating around the center of the galaxy. Researchers thought this disk formed around 8 to 10 billion years ago, but with the help of machine learning, they've found some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old.

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