Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2018

MARCH-APRIL 2018 inner Milky Way is such a crowded environment, it has always been a challenge to disentangle stellar mo- tions to probe the bulge in detail. Now, a new analysis of about 10,000 normal Sun-like stars in the bulge reveals that our galaxy’s hub is a dynamic environment of stars of various ages zipping around at dif- ferent speeds, like travelers bustling about a busy airport. This conclu- sion is based on nine years’ worth The archaeology of our Milky Way’s ancient hub probed by Hubble by NASA/ESA F or many years, astronomers had a simple view of our Milky Way’s central hub, or bulge, as a quiescent place composed of old stars, the earliest homesteaders of our galaxy. However, because the