Scientists at Penn State and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS) have come up with a map to help you understand motions of enormous celestial bodies across truly incomprehensible distances. The map of the Milky Way galaxy shows migration of stars happen throughout it.

"We were able to measure the properties of nearly 70,000 stars in our Galaxy for this particular study using the innovative SDSS infrared spectrograph", said Donald Schneider, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and a coauthor of the study.

It's right to call the exercise a Galactic archeology. From locations, motions to compositions of the stars are revealed by these data, allowing you get a deeper understanding of their formation and their history.

Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph was put into use by the researchers to build the map. This helped them observe some 10,000 stars over a period of four years.

The researchers said 30% of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy now don't exist in a place where they were originally born. The researchers derived this conclusion after measuring the chemical compositions of the stars and the galaxy.

Jo Bovy of the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Toronto said less heavy-element enrichment was noticed in the stars in the outer disk of the Milky Way. A small fraction of stars in the outer disk has heavier element abundances that are heavier element abundances.

Irregularities in the Milky Way Galaxy, like the spiral arms, could best explain the migrations.