Humanity's quest to understand the stars has just received a huge boost. Researchers have released the "chemical fingerprints" of hundreds of thousands of stars, helping piece together information on the evolution of the Milky Way. And the data it's all built on was gathered right here in Australia.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Far away from the city lights in the NSW central west, this telescope has spent the past decade
00:09observing close to a million stars.
00:12It's part of a project called GALAR, although it's anything but foolish.
00:17Our big idea is to try to use stars as our fossils to trace back how the Milky Way formed
00:23and evolved.
00:24GALAR stands for Galactic Archaeology Using Hermes, the spectrograph seen here.
00:30The Australian-led project has just released the chemical fingerprints of more than 900,000 stars.
00:36So we take the light from each star and we split it up by wavelength, like with a prism,
00:39but extremely precise.
00:41This is what that looks like for Alpha Centauri A. The unique barcodes on the rainbow show
00:46what elements are inside.
00:48And this is the data from Methuselah's star.
00:50It has significantly fewer barcodes, meaning significantly fewer heavy elements.
00:55It's allowing scientists to piece together simulations like this, showing the hypothesised
01:00evolution of the Milky Way.
01:02And only if we have all of the measurements, we can go to the simulators, to the theorists
01:07and ask them, can you check that?
01:09There's so much more to learn.
01:11The data gathered here will lay the groundwork for research well into the future, not to
01:15mention right now, under the Milky Way, tonight.