View of the farthest star in the Milky Way – Space & Astronomy
Photo More than a million light-years away, it is the most distant star ever observed in the Milky Way. Located about midway from our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, it is part of a group of more than 200 newly discovered stars, allowing us to track the outer limits of the Milky Way’s stellar halo, which extends far beyond the galactic disk. . The study, led by the University of California, Santa Cruz and presented at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Seattle, used data collected by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (Cfht), located on the island of Hawaii and managed by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). , the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Hawaii.
Graphic representation of the Milky Way’s halo, which extends far beyond the galactic disk, up to about a million light-years from the center (Source: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild/STScI)
“This study redefines what constitutes the outer limit of our galaxy,” said Raja Guathakurta, co-author of the study led by Yuteng Feng. “The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are both so massive that they almost touch. That is precisely why – GuhaThakurta adds – it is very difficult to study the outer halo, although it contains a significant part of the mass of the entire galaxy.
The very distant stars observed belong to the class of so-called RR Lyrae: they are old stars that expand and contract periodically and very regularly, and their luminosity varies. “The way its brightness changes looks like an EKG – says GuhaThakurta – it’s like the heartbeat of a galaxy.” These properties make them ideal as reference points for calculating galactic distances and have allowed us to confirm that the outer edge of the Milky Way is about a million light-years away from the center.
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