First of Missing Primitive Stars Found

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2010) — Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe -- a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.


"This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself," said astronomer Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Nature paper reporting the finding.

Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies with just a few billion stars, compared to hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. In the "bottom-up model" of galaxy formation, large galaxies attained their size over billions of years by absorbing their smaller neighbors.

"If you watched a time-lapse movie of our galaxy, you would see a swarm of dwarf galaxies buzzing around it like bees around a beehive," explained Frebel. "Over time, those galaxies smashed together and mingled their stars to make one large galaxy -- the Milky Way."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100303131658.htm

[azul]

1. Wow. And when the larger galaxies smash together?

And so on...

There is something funny happening here.