The solar system is located in an extremely ancient region of the universe.

Our Sun lies between the rings, while the surrounding red area contains the locations of ancient stars.

An ancient group of stars near the sun formed during the dawn of the universe, within a billion years of the Big Bang that gave birth to everything. The discovery suggests that the region of the Milky Way that contains our solar system is likely much older than previously thought, Live Science reported on August 4.

Most stars, including the sun, are located inside a thin disk that rotates around the center of the Milky Way. Researchers think this disk formed between 8 and 10 billion years ago. But with the help of machine learning, they found that some of the stars here are more than 13 billion years old.

A team of experts from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany found the true age of the star group thanks to data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia telescope.

Scientists are piecing together the history of the Milky Way, and Gaia's data allows for the creation of maps that record the ages, chemical compositions, and motions of stars.

In the new report, the team analyzed more than 800,000 stars in the solar system’s periphery, located within about 3,200 light years of the sun. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and contains more than 100 billion stars.

"The ancient stars in the disk suggest that the formation of the Milky Way's thin disk began 4-5 billion years earlier than previously thought," said report author Samir Nepal, a graduate student at AIP.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. So the presence of stars older than 13 billion years suggests that the disk at the center of the Milky Way must have formed within the first billion years following the Big Bang.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/he-mat-troi-nam-trong-khu-vuc-vo-cung-co-xua-cua-vu-tru-185240804113259107.htm