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A new survey of stars near the Sun reveals a wild and crazy past in which wanderers arrived from all directions under the gravitational influences of black holes, clouds of gas and invading galaxies.
European astronomers spent 15 years making 1001 nights of observations to detail the motions of more than 14,000 stars that are currently in the solar neighborhood, a tiny corner of the Milky Way. Tracing the movements back in time with a computer, the researchers found that most of the stars were once much farther from the Sun than they are today.
While astronomers expected the early history of the Milky Way was quite chaotic, most had believed "that it since had been rather calm," said study leader Birgitta Nordstrom of the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics, and Geophysics in Copenhagen. "But this turns out not to be true. Stars have been perturbed all the time throughout the Milky Way history."
The study was released Tuesday.
"Now that we know the orbits of all the stars, we can see that many nearby stars come from far away and are just transiting near us now," said Johannes Andersen, also of the Niels Bohr Institute.
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