Twelve for dinner: The Milky Way’s feeding habits shine a light on dark matter
Understanding these star streams is very important for astronomers. As well as revealing the dark matter that holds the stars in their orbits, they also tell us about the formation history of the Milky Way, revealing that the Milky Way has steadily grown over billions of years by shredding and consuming smaller stellar systems.
Prof. Li and her international team of collaborators initiated a dedicated program -- the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey -- to measure the properties of stellar streams: the shredded remains of neighboring small galaxies and star clusters that are being torn apart by our own Milky Way.
Unlike previous studies that have focused on one stream at a time,"S5 is dedicated to measuring as many streams as possible, which we can do very efficiently with the unique capabilities of the AAT," comments co-author Professor Daniel Zucker of Macquarie University. As well as measuring their speeds, the astronomers can use these observations to work out the chemical compositions of the stars, telling us where they were born."Stellar streams can come either from disrupting galaxies or star clusters," says Professor Alex Ji at the University of Chicago, a co-author on the study."These two types of streams provide different insights into the nature of dark matter.
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