Astronomers catch pic of 100,000 exploding stars in Milky Way's heart

Looking into the center of the Milky Way can reveal some quite perplexing clues about how our universe began, and the events that have eventually brought us to what we now call the present.

Astronomers do this on a very regular occasion, and just recently, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope or VLT for short, located in Chile's Atacama Desert managed to catch something amazing. Astronomers created a high-resolution image of our galaxy's center, and from the observations, they have learned of a new star formation burst that occurred in the early days of the Milky Way.

This burst of stars led to more than 100,000 supernovas, or more simply put, exploding stars. According to Rainer Schodel, a researcher with the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA) in Granada, Spain that led the study "Our unprecedented survey of a large part of the Galactic center has given us detailed insights into the formation process of stars in this region of the Milky Way. Contrary to what had been accepted up to now, we found that the formation of stars has not been continuous." It was found that about 80% of the stars located near the core of the Milky Way were formed anywhere between 8 billion and 13.5 billion years ago.