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A stellar clock reveals the assembly history of the Milky Way

A brief stage in stellar evolution offers a precise means of dating stars in the Milky Way. The ages, compositions and motions of these stars all pinpoint the dynamical processes involved in the Galaxy’s formation.
  1. Timothy C. Beers

    1. Timothy C. Beers is in the Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA.

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The broad-brush picture of how and when the stars in our Galaxy came together has been a topic of active research since the early 1950s1. Much can be learnt about this process by looking at the chemical composition of stars, which is, in turn, determined by the ‘birth date’ of a star — the precise time at which it formed from the chemical elements in its vicinity. But such precision requires a remarkable timepiece, and it turns out that the subgiant phase of a star’s evolution offers the most precise stellar clock available. Writing in Nature, Xiang and Rix2 use this method to report the ages of almost a quarter of a million subgiant stars in the inner halo and disk of the Milky Way — revealing the sequence of events that took place to form our Galaxy.

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Nature 603, 580-581 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00768-2

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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