A search for variable stars called RR Lyrae has found some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way’s halo a million light years away. Astronomers have discovered more than 200 distant variable stars known as RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way’s stellar halo. The most distant of these stars are mo
This illustration shows the Milky Way galaxy’s inner and outer halos. A halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding a galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild Milky WayAstronomers have discovered more than 200 distant variable stars known as RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way’s stellar halo. The most distant of these stars are more than a million light-years from Earth, almost half the distance to our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light-years away.
GuhaThakurta explained that the stellar halo component of our galaxy is much bigger than the disk, which is about 100,000 light-years across. Our solar system resides in one of the spiral arms of the disk. In the middle of the disk is a central bulge, and surrounding it is the halo, which contains the oldest stars in the galaxy and extends for hundreds of thousands of light years in every direction.
According to Feng, previous modeling studies had calculated that the stellar halo should extend out to around 300 kiloparsecs or 1 million light years from the galactic center. The 208 RR Lyrae stars detected by Feng and his colleagues ranged in distance from about 20 to 320 kiloparsecs. According to GuhaThakurta, the excellent quality of the NGVS data enabled the team to obtain the most reliable and precise characterization of RR Lyrae at these distances. RR Lyrae are old stars with very specific physical properties that cause them to expand and contract in a regularly repeating cycle.
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