After a decade spent monitoring the sky, an international team of astronomers have discovered a nursery of newborn stars, along with an entirely new type of elder star that has been hidden at the heart of our galaxy — and which may solve a mystery about the formation of new elements in the universe.
Published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, four new research papers detail the fruit of a 10-year survey of hundreds of millions of stars conducted at the Cerro Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Andes. Using the observatory’s massive, high-powered Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA), researchers notice that 222 of those many-millions of stars were acting odd, and flashing dramatically in strange patterns.
