Playing Detective on a Galactic Scale: Huge New Dataset Will Solve Multiple Milky Way Mysteries
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Playing detective on a galactic scale: Huge new dataset will solve multiple Milky Way mysteries:
How do stars destroy lithium? Was a drastic change in the shape of the Milky Way caused by the sudden arrival of millions of stellar stowaways?
These are just a couple of the astronomical questions likely to be answered following the release today of 'GALAH DR3', the largest set of stellar chemical data ever compiled.
The data, comprising more than 500 GB of information gleaned from more than 30 million individual measurements, was gathered by astronomers including Sven Buder, Sarah Martell and Sanjib Sharma from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D) using the Anglo Australian Telescope (AAT) at the Australian Astronomical Observatory at Siding Spring in rural New South Wales.
The release is the third from the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) project, which aims to investigate star formation, chemical enrichment, migration and mergers in the Milky Way. It does this using an instrument called the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph, or HERMES, which is connected to the AAT.
The new data covers 600,000 stars and takes the project very close to meeting its goal of surveying one million.
"It's a bit like a galactic version of the game Cluedo," said ASTRO 3-D's Sven Buder, a research fellow at the Australian National University.
"The chemical information we've gathered is rather like stellar DNA-we can use it to tell where each star has come from. We can also determine their ages and movements, and furnish a deeper understanding of how the Milky Way evolved."
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