The Milky Way left its “poor old heart” in and around the constellation Sagittarius, astronomers report. New data from the Gaia spacecraft reveal the full extent of what seems to be the galaxy’s original nucleus — the ancient stellar population that the rest of the Milky Way grew around — which came together more than 12.5 billion years ago.
“People have long speculated that such a vast population [of old stars] should exist in the center of our Milky Way, and Gaia now shows that there they are,” says astronomer Hans-Walter Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
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