The Daily Space’s Pamela Gay has been on location at the meeting this week, and her favorite story of the week has been the discovery of a young cluster of stars in the halo of the Milky Way. Anyone who has taken an introductory astronomy class has probably seen a diagram of the Milky Way the states our Galaxy’s halo is old, with the oldest stars and star clusters. The disk, with all its dust and gas, is the place to look for star formation.

But if there is any one thing our universe can’t do, that one thing is conform to expectations. While the outer halo of the Milky Way is largely devoid of dense gas and dust there are exceptions, and one of those exceptions turned into a small cluster of a few 1000 stars. The material to form these stars was stripped from the Magellanic Clouds at some point in the past as they gravitationally interacted with the Milky Way. These small irregular galaxies have material pulled out in front and trailing behind them, and this cluster is in the leading arm of material. The cluster is similar in age to the Pleiades cluster: about 117 million years old.

This small cluster gives astronomers a few thousand new stars they can use to gauge the distance to the streams of material associated with the Magellanic Clouds, and these stars allow measurements far more precise than was possible from just looking at the previously observed gas. These new measurements radically changed our understanding of where this stream is, halving the distance to just 90,000 ly away. This new location for the stream of gas changes how we understand the motions of the Magellanic Clouds, and will allow new calculations of how the tiny galaxies have interacted with our galaxy in the past, and whether or not they will fly away in the future. Those calculations will be the subject of future papers, but for now it’s just cool to know that new stars can sometimes be found in even the most barren wastelands between galaxies.

See more on this at:

The Milky Way’s Impending Galactic Collision Is Already Birthing New Stars (Simons Foundation)