Three alien stars circling the Milky Way could be some of the oldest ever found in the universe, a new study reveals. The ancient celestial objects may have been among the first to form after the Big Bang and were likely stolen by our galaxy during gravitational tugs-of-war billions of years ago.
In the study, published May 14 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reanalyzed three previously observed stars each located around 30,000 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way's halo — a massive cloud of stars that orbit beyond our galaxy's main galactic disk. The basic chemical composition of these stars suggests they are all between 12 and 13 billion years old, making them almost as old as the universe itself, which formed around 13.8 billion years ago.
