Rogue star family violates space rules

Astronomers discover an unusual cosmic family drama that plays for 650 light years, in which more than 1,000 young stars behave in the behavior of our understanding of stellar evolution.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia Space Telescope has identified a group of giant stars called “Ophion” that break up with unprecedented speed and total chaos, something astronomers think that star families of this size are impossible.

“Ophion is full of stars who will rush to the galaxy in a completely casual, incongruous way, far from what we expect from a family that big,” explains Dylan Huson of Western Washington University, the lead author of the Exploration paper. “More importantly, this will happen in a very small amount of time that is spreading for such a large star family. Just like other star families we’ve seen before.”

Stars usually form in clusters, and similar stars are born in approximately the same region. While smaller groups can completely dissipate, larger families often move in a coordinated way and travel together for billions of years. Ophion violated this expectation, and although its members have less than 20 million years of history, their members are scattered in all directions at high speeds – just babies.

To make this discovery, researchers developed a new model called Gaia Net, which analyzes spectral data from hundreds of millions of stars. This innovative approach allows them to identify young, low-quality stars that were not detected by previous methods.

“This is the first time a similar model can be used for young stars because of the huge volume and high-quality spectral observations needed to make them work,” said Johannes Sahlmann, a project scientist at Esa Gaia.

The discovery highlights how Gaia’s unprecedented mapping capabilities change our understanding of the Milky Way. After more than a decade of observation, the telescope stopped operating in March, which has systematically measured the location, motion and characteristics of nearly 2 billion stars with unprecedented accuracy.

What causes Ophion’s abnormal behavior remains a mystery. The research team raised several possibilities: The Star family resided near other large gatherings of stars, and the interaction between these cosmic neighbors may have influenced the development of Ophion. The evidence also suggests that past supernova explosions in the region could sweep away material and cause Ophion’s stars to move more wrongly.

“We don’t know what happened to this star family because we haven’t discovered anything like that before. It’s a mystery,” said Marina Kounkel, a co-author of the University of North Florida.

This discovery challenges astronomers’ methods of identifying star families. Traditional methods look for stars that move together in coordinated mode, but the chaotic movement of Ophion means these technologies will miss them.

“We might have been missing a lot of money without the huge, high-quality data sets of Gaia, and the new models we can now use to mine these models,” Kounkel added.

Ophion’s discovery illustrates how a combination of large-scale data collection and innovative computing methods reveals undetected phenomena in our galaxy. Although Gaia completed the observation task, scientists expect to discover more discoveries as they continue to analyze their data treasures.

The research team includes undergraduate and graduate computer science majors who help develop data analysis methods and demonstrate how open science policy creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Astronomers predict that studying anomalous star families like Ophion will provide important insights into the complex dynamics of star evolution and shaping our galaxy. Gaia’s upcoming data release, released in 2030, is expected to reveal more surprises in the universe.

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