Astronomers notice a bright-blue bridge of stars, and it's getting ready to blow

Astrophysicists have found a replacement region of the Milky Way System, and it's full of searingly hot, bright-blue stars that area unit getting ready to explode.

The researchers were making the foremost elaborated map nevertheless of the star-flecked spiral arms of our galactic neighborhood with the EU house Agency's (ESA) Gaia telescope after they discovered the region, that they need to be named the constellation spur, they reportable in a very new study.

Nestled between the Orion Arm — wherever our system is— and also the constellation Perseus, the spur could be a belt between 2 spiral arms full of huge stars 3 times the mass of the sun and colored blue by their blistering heat.

Astronomers decision these large, blue stars OB stars as a result of they're among the most popular within the stellar arrangement. Stars of this sort area unit the rarest, hottest, shortest-living, and largest stars within the entire galaxy. The violent nuclear reactions happening within their hearts create them sixfold hotter than the sun. and also the huge stellar explosions that finish their lives — known as supernovas — scatter the serious components essential for complicated life way into the galaxy.

"OB stars area unit rare, in a very Galaxy of four hundred billion stars there maybe but two hundred,000," study author architect Pantaleoni González, a scientist at the Spanish biology Center (CAB), told Live Science. "And as they are chargeable for the creation of loads of the serious components, they'll very be seen because of the chemical enrichers of the galaxy. It's as a result of stars like these, dead way back, that the chemical science of our planet was complicated enough for organic chemistry to arise." where we discover blue stars, we discover the foremost active and most "alive" regions of the galaxy, in keeping with the researchers.

The researchers compiled their star map by triangulating the stars' distances to Earth employing a technique known as annual parallax. By examining the apparent positions of the celebrities, discovered from completely different views throughout Earth's orbit around the sun, astronomers will calculate the distances to the celebrities themselves. victimization of this system, besides knowledge from the ESA's Gaia telescope, the team prepared stars at distances on the far side any of these charted before and in areas of house antecedently thought to be empty.

"After months of labor, we tend to saw this stunning map for the primary time," Pantaleoni González aforesaid. "I felt like AN someone of the enlightenment, tracing the primary correct maps of our world — just on another scale. I felt very humble and little seeing however immense our stellar neighborhood is."

The scientists tested that the new region was a section of the spiral galactic disk comprising most of our galaxy's material, and not simply a random alignment of stars, by perceptive them moving systematically within the same direction.

They additionally suspect that staring at the spur's position, which is slightly higher than the galactic disk, might give some tantalizing hints regarding the opaque Way's past.

"If we tend to live in a very galaxy with corrugations, that area unit slight vertical variations or ripples across its disk, it might purpose to a history of violent evolution for our galaxy," Pantaleoni González aforesaid. "They may well be signs of past collisions with different galaxies."

The next step for the researchers is going to be to place further OB stars into a lot of precise maps, that they hope can manufacture even a lot of insights into our Galaxy’s structures.