Generally, stars born in the same place move together through the Galaxy over hundreds of millions and billions of years. However, scientists recently discovered a “family” of luminaries that started flying apart incredibly fast.
Star families
Scientists working with data from the Gaia space telescope have reported the discovery of a highly unusual family of stars. It is located relatively close to Earth and is interesting for the incredible speed at which its members fly off in different directions.
In general, the word “family” in relation to vision is quite conditional. Astronomers are familiar with a variety of clusters where many luminaries are concentrated in a small area of space. In such places stars are born, and further already travel along the Milky Way.
In this case, all the luminaries, once born in the same place may have different mass and, as a consequence, the rate of evolution, but their age is usually the same and their chemical composition is quite similar. When you add in similar trajectories around the center of the Milky Way, you can see what scientists mean when they talk about star families.
The unusual Ophion family
Star clusters eventually break up, becoming star streams that can be tracked in the Galaxy for quite some time, but eventually finally dissipate. With small families this happens relatively quickly. Larger ones remain united for a very long time.
However, scientists have recently discovered a family of stars called Ophion. It consists of at least 1000 members and is quite young. However, the luminaries included in it already have very different vectors of motion. Scientists have never seen this before.
Ophion was discovered by applying it to data published in the third release of Gaia. The researchers applied the Gaia Net model to it to search for and study the parameters of young, low-mass stars.
This star cluster is about 650 light years away from us. It is in a region where several other powerful star-forming regions are located. In addition, numerous traces of supernova flares have been found nearby. Apparently, one of these events is involved in the anomalous dispersal of the star family, but how is still unknown.
After years of operation, the Gaia space telescope has completed its work. However, in that time, it has accumulated so much data that scientists are still just beginning to sort it out. The next release is scheduled for 2026 and it won’t be the last either. So we can hope that scientists will find many more treasures in this information.
According to phys.org
