Astronomers have combined the age data that they gathered by studying 70,000 stars across the Milky Way galaxy. The outcome of the ages of stars was assembled into the largest ever made galactic map.

Subsequently, the galactic map validated what has been considered the growth path of our galaxy, it commenced in from the mid of the galaxy and moved outwards. The trend was evident in several old stars that were found close to the centre of the disc.

The lead researcher Dr. Melissa Ness of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany stated that this view of stellar ages across the disc has allowed the astronomers to discover certain exceptional aspects of the galaxy formation. The branches of the map reach beyond the Earth, ahead of the galaxy’s centre in one direction and in the other direction it extends to the disc’s distant locations. For measuring the stars’ ages Dr. Ness and her team collectively studied data from two telescopes.

The astronomers used data from the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Apogee project. This telescope uses a wide range of wavelengths to sample 300 stars at one time. These ranges enable the astronomers to assess the chemical structure of stars. However, the age cannot be directly calculated using this data. The team, therefore, used the subset of stars that’s the Kepler satellite examined from the space. The Keplar is capable of determining the mass of the stars by studying them over a long period of time.

Dr. Ness revealed that the age of the Keplar stars can be discovered if their mass is known. The data collected from the two sources helped the team develop a model that associated the mass and age of the star to its color spectrum obtained from the Apogee data. The model thus formulated was used to measure the age of the residual stars on the basis of their spectra.