“We are lucky to live on a planet that has all the chemical elements necessary for life as we know it. This is a very different place in our galaxy,” says the study’s lead researcher.
“The Milky Way could be up to two billion years older than currently thought,” says the principal investigator of a project simulating the origin and evolution of our galaxy in Santiago, Chile. In fact, we can find stars in the Milky Way that predate the galaxy and are as old as the universe itself.
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The project is the result of a collaboration between Argentina, Chile and Spain called “CIELO: Chemodynamic Properties of Galaxies and Cosmic Networks”. The team’s research predates the pandemic and will continue for at least the next five years. Chile is undoubtedly the optical astronomy capital of the world – with international telescopes and observatories all over the country’s arid northern territory.
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“CIELO is a project that aims to create a virtual universe to study how galaxies form and in particular how the Milky Way formed,” says Patricia Tissera, CIELO principal investigator and astrophysicist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, during an interview in Santiago. .
How does it work?
“We take the velocity, the mass distribution, the temperature, the chemical elements in the stars and the gas around them, and compare that data to observations,” Tissera explains. From this comparison, we will understand whether we have created the right hypotheses or whether they need some modification.
During the galaxy’s earliest days, gas and dust from the early universe flowed into the Milky Way’s dark matter field, the hypothetical region that surrounds it. This field in turn attracted enough gas and dust to begin forming the galaxy’s first molecular clusters, which eventually grew into stars.
It is hard to believe that we are the only intelligent species that subsisted on such chemical enrichment.
It’s all about cosmic feedback
“When supernova explosions occur, significant amounts of energy and chemical elements are released back into the interstellar medium, changing its chemical and thermodynamic properties,” says Pedrosa. This is key to regulating star formation.
How unique is our Milky Way?
“It’s a regular galaxy, but it’s rare in the sense that it hasn’t undergone a massive merger in the last billion years,” Tissera answers. Three billion years after the Big Bang, the Milky Way’s morphology was virtually fixed.
Both Tissera and Pedrosa don’t think the Milky Way is a big departure from the realm of spiral galaxies. But its chemical evolution is large enough for us to benefit from billions of years of chemical enrichment. Earth contains an abundance of iron and rare earth metals that have been formed through stellar nucleosynthesis over billions of years.
All of this makes us wonder if there is an astrobiological vector in our cosmic evolution. It is hard to believe that we are the only intelligent species that has subsisted on such chemical enrichment throughout cosmic time.
“We are lucky to live on a planet that has all the chemical elements necessary for life as we know it. This is a very different place in our galaxy,” concludes Tissera.
