Once upon a time there was the Milky Way…

NOTur Galaxy has just taken a big hit of old! A new study that makes the cover of the latest issue of the journal Nature suggests that the Milky Way began to form about 2 billion years earlier than scientists previously thought. A reassessment that brings the beginning of its formation considerably closer to the Big Bang itself. Indeed, in a fraction of our Milky Way that astronomers call the thick disk, two researchers from the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Hans-Walter Rix and Maosheng Xiang, have identified stars that would have appeared 13 billion years ago. years, that is to say only 800 million years after the supposed birth of the Universe.

This feat was made possible by comparing the results of two groups…