Here's an apple that landed far from the tree. A dim star just 13 light years from Earth was born in a cluster 17,000 light years away.
Discovered in 1897, Kapteyn's Star is the 25th nearest star system to our sun, but it is no local, says Elizabeth Wylie-de Boer of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.
The cool star's composition is tricky to study, but astronomers can look at 16 other stars in the same "moving group", all of which orbit the galaxy backwards and are very old. The odd motion marks them as members of the Milky Way's ancient population of halo stars.
Of the stars, 14 had the same abundance of elements – such as sodium, magnesium, zirconium, barium – as Omega Centauri, the galaxy's most luminous globular cluster. The cluster emits a million times more light than the sun.
"It's long been thought that Omega Centauri is the left-over nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way," says Wylie-de Boer, whose paper will appear in the Astronomical Journal. "During the merger, the outer regions of this dwarf galaxy were stripped."
Some of the cast-off stars ended up near the Sun, with one landing a mere 13 light years from Earth.
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Have your say
a story not finished. So it is revolving counter to the other local traffic. What is it's relative velocity -- 180 degrees to the sun's, 80 degrees, ...? How long will it be in our vicinity? Are the other stars of it's "sisterhood" also traveling in close proximity? Come on -- answer some reasonably expected questions....
Here here. Where's the stats?
Perhaps you mean, hear hear?
Or are you trying to draw attention to two locations in your immediate vicinity?
Or do some of the research yourself.. There's a reason they link to the journal/paper.
What About It's Relative Motion?
Fri Nov 13 00:13:39 GMT 2009 by Talvin Bernard
http://freetubetv.net
Leave the star alone, he's a tourist just dropping by
This comment breached our terms of use and has been removed.
What If?
Wed Nov 11 18:31:04 GMT 2009 by Miguel
http://ruisilva.com
Hey there, just wondering if these residual effects of galactic collisions, from long ago and that are common, be whats interfering with the many failed models regarding gravitational predictions. Are past collisions of this magnitude been factored in? surely centripetal and centrifugal motions have an altering effect and in galactic proportions they can last surely for a few billion years or so... but thats my common sense! not in anyway science!
just my laymen two cents.
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