Resumen de Family tree of stars traces galaxy's past
Astronomers use chemical tagging to try to identify stellar siblings even if they have drifted apart. But Paula Jofre at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues thought they could take this a step further by taking a page from evolutionary biology. Combining traces of 17 chemical elements as stellar "DNA", the team categorized 22 stars in the galactic neighborhood. The team assembled a tree with three branches associated with stars of different origins. The group suggests that the thicker part of the galaxy's disc forms new stars more rapidly than elsewhere in the Milky Way. Some stars may have even originated in another galaxy that collided with the Milky Way long ago.
