In the Milky Way Galaxy, you have two kinds of stars: those that stay put and stars that like to travel far from home.
A new map of the Milky Way, created by scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), shows that a surprisingly large proportion, 30 percent, of its stars are wanderers that have dramatically changed orbits during their lifetimes.
The discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal, brings a new understanding of how stars are formed, and how they travel throughout our galaxy, researchers said.
100,000 Stars
To build a map of the Milky Way, scientists used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph to observe 100,000 stars over a four-year period.
