Two astrophysicists from the Institute of Astronomy Max Planck in Germany proved that the center of our Milky Way galaxy is bathed by two separate stellar streams of very old stars, which they called Shiva and Shakti. The age of these stars is 12-13 billion years, the same age as our galaxy, making them a valuable and truly archaeological find.

Reported in the magazine Astrophysical Journal The discovery of ancient star formations around the center of the Milky Way, each with a mass of about 10 million solar masses, helped build the European astrometric satellite “Gaia”. “Gaia” examines the properties of stars in our galaxy and nearby stars, such as speed and motion vector, distance and even metallicity. Thus, the satellite helps create a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way and estimate the approximate age of stars (the more atoms of matter heavier than helium are in the spectrum of stars, the older they are).

Examining Gaia data sets, astrophysicist Khyati Malhan and astronomer Hans Walter-Rix discovered two independent but adjacent stellar populations that are approximately 13 billion years old. Like other stars in the galaxy, they orbit around the center of the Milky Way along with other objects, but they behave somewhat like separate structures. In fact, these are two stellar streams from ancient stars. The one closer to the center of the galaxy is called Shiva by scientists, and the one a little further away is called Shakti.

“What’s really surprising is that we can detect these ancient structures, Malhan said. — “The Milky Way has changed so much since the birth of these stars that we did not expect to recognize them so clearly as a group, but the unprecedented data we received from Gaia made it possible.”

It is thought that the Milky Way galaxy began to form 13 billion years ago. Stars of the Shiva and Shakti currents seem to have served as the first groups that initiated the formation processes of the arms of the galaxy. Later they became, as scientists put it, “small branches”, but time and matter turned them into full-fledged spiral arms 100 thousand light-years long.

Scientists can reconstruct the history of the Milky Way’s evolution from the formation of star groups such as Shiva and Shakti. Stellar streams can be traced back to ancient star clusters that contributed to the formation of our galaxy, see what stars the Milky Way acquired through the absorption of dwarf galaxies, and learn a lot about our galaxy’s past. This is valuable not only for studying our stellar home, but also for understanding the early history of the universe, making the discovery doubly valuable.