WASHINGTON: Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy — almost halfway to a neighbouring galaxy.
The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way’s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The most distant one appears to have a mass about 70% that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.
An undated illustration shows the Milky Way galaxy’s inner and outer halos. A halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding a galaxy. NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI).— Reuters
The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.
“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged — or more straightforwardly, cannibalized — by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event,” Feng added.
The Milky Way has grown over time through such calamities.
“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies — by eating its own kind,” said study co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, UC Santa Cruz’s chair of astronomy and astrophysics.
Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and central bulge that are teeming with stars. The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its centre about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion–400 billion stars including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5% of the galaxy’s stars.
Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.
The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighbouring Andromeda galaxy.
“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended — and are almost ‘back-to-back,'” Feng said.
The search for life beyond the Earth focuses on rocky planets akin to Earth orbiting in what is called the “habitable zone” around stars. More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, already have been discovered.
“We don’t know for sure, but each of these outer halo stars should be about as likely to have planets orbiting them as the sun and other sun-like stars in the Milky Way,” GuhaThakurta said.
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif was visited in Islamabad by a four-person Google delegation led by Mr. Scott Beaumont, President of the APAC area.
Pakistan’s digital economy is about to undergo a revolutionary change, according to the prime minister, who greeted the team. Speaking on the government’s intentions to reach the goal of US$ 25 billion in exports over the next five years, the prime minister revealed that funding will be used for youth training, IT infrastructure upgrades, and regulatory environment enhancements. Pakistan’s economy is being fully digitalised, he remarked. In his attempts, he stressed the need of working together with a tech behemoth like Google.
The Prime Minister praised Google for pioneering projects that have dramatically enhanced the lives of thousands of Pakistanis in recent years, as well as for its involvement in propelling the country’s digital economy closer to reality. Noting with satisfaction that Google has helped Pakistani young land about a million jobs in 2023 alone, the Prime Minister emphasised that this is a testament to both Google’s dedication to upskilling and empowering Pakistan’s youth and Pakistan’s potential in the digital marketplace.
Informing the Prime Minister of its future involvement intentions, Mr. Scott stated that Google has made the decision to support the government’s youth skill-training initiatives and to expand its investment footprint in Pakistan. He went on to say that for a values-driven digital firm like Google, the growing economy and the sizeable youth population are crucial for optimising the economic benefits of technology. He restated that Pakistan’s IT industry will undergo a revolution when five lac Chromebooks are produced there by 2026.
Android users now have the ability to install or update many apps or games at once in the Play Store thanks to a feature introduced by tech giant Google.
Even if Android users downloaded or tried to update several apps or games at once, the prior capability would only process one app at a time.
In the Google Play Store, users can now download or manually update up to three apps or games at once, according to a GSMArena report.
with order to assist Android users with updating or installing multiple apps at once, Google is reportedly already starting to roll out the new feature in a few select locations, including India.
The feature will process three apps at once while sending the fourth to pending when customers install or manually update programs.
When configuring new phones or recovering from a backup, this feature is said to save a tonne of time.
It should be mentioned that Apple has long since permitted customers to download and install up to three iOS apps at once from the App Store.
According to GSMArena, the function is really available on a few cell phones in some regions, even though Google has not formally confirmed when it will appear or whether it will work with any particular handset.
Google started releasing a new AI-powered feature for Android phones a few weeks ago that locks users out of their data to prevent hackers from accessing it.
According to a Forbes story, cellphones running Android 10 or later will soon be able to use the function, which incorporates artificial intelligence.
The anti-theft feature known as “theft detection lock” is currently being rolled out to certain users, according to Mishaal Rahman, who frequently updates his followers on the most recent OS changes on X.
A restricted group of customers who registered for the beta program in Brazil are now receiving theft detection locks, according to Rahman’s post.
Rehman claims that Google Play Services will be used to provide the AI-powered feature to all Android 10 devices.