News
Astronomers have uncovered a huge haul of hidden stars, including some violently erupting newborn protostars and others that fall under an unexpected new category of ancient giant red stars. They dub the latter bodies ‘old smokers’. These old smokers lurk at the heart of the Milky Way, the team says, sitting quietly for decades and fading away until they eventually puff out vast clouds of smoke. The stars were discovered through a ten-year survey of the sky conducted with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA), located high in the Chilean Andes at Cerro Paranal Observatory. This effort managed to track almost 1 billion stars.
The same investigation, known as VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV), also uncovered dozens of erupting protostars as the international team behind the study looked closely at 222 stars. “About two-thirds of the stars were easy to classify as well-understood events of various types,” Phillip Lucas, team leader and a professor at the University of Hertfordshire, said. “The rest were a bit more difficult, so we used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to get spectra of many of them individually. A spectrum shows us how much light we can see at a spread of different wavelengths, giving a much clearer idea of what we are looking at.”
The stars spotted by the team had remained hidden due to the vast amounts of gas and dust that block our view of the Milky Way’s heart. This
