Recently astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University’s Astrophysics program have discovered a group of nitrogen rich star near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Liverpool John Moores University is a member of an international collaboration of scientists called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. One of the projects lead by this organization called APOGEE, which stands for the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, collects infrared data for thousands of stars across the Milky Way galaxy. It was through this infrared data collection that the astronomers discovered a peculiar group of stars. The discovery of these stars has given us new clues as to how the globular clusters, which are areas of densely concentrated stars that were …show more content…
Observing in the infrared, which is less absorbed by dust than visible light, APOGEE can see the center of the Galaxy better than other teams”
From their observations the astronomers were able to determine the chemical make up of make up of many of the stars and noticed some of them had an unusually high amount of nitrogen. They theorize that these stars resulted from the destruction of the globular cluster but they are still gathering more observations to prove this. I find this discovery pretty interesting because I feel as if it relates strongly to what we learned in class. The infrared data collection used in the experiment seems similar to the technique used to look at new stars which like the center of galaxy are all surrounded by dust and gas which limits visibility. I had two confusions about the article the first is related to the rich in nitrogen chemical composition of the stars. When I first started reading the article I had assumed that the stars were rich in nitrogen because they were old and had converted all of there hydrogen and helium but the article later clarifies that they believe these newly discovered stars were formed from the material of the older generation of stars (which I assume were also rich in elements heavier than hydrogen when they died) that were destroyed during the formation of the galactic core. Does this mean that stars can form from