Locating Cepheids, young stars that regularly emit pulses of brightness, is a boon for astronomers, as they allow us to measure cosmic distances and establish the distribution of celestial bodies in our galaxy . And that is precisely what an international group of scientists led by Professor Noriyuki Matsunaga, of the University of Tokyo, was trying: to look for “cosmic lighthouses” in the central region of the Milky Way.
To do this, they analyzed observations in the range of infrared radiation taken by the South African Large Telescope (SALT), capable of penetrating the intergalactic dust clouds that usually interpose between observatories and stars . And what did they find? Well, almost nothing in a huge space , which stretched 8,000 light years from the core of the galaxy.
This indicates that this area hardly contains young stars –the Cepheids are between 10 and 300 million years old–; it is an inert desert. "The results indicate that there has been no significant star formation there for hundreds of millions of years," explained Italian astronomer Giusseppe Bono, co-author of the study, which has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Scientists suggest that this discovery would force us to revise our view of the Milky Way .
Image: University of Tokyo
