Stars Are Not Made from a Single Mold: The Gaia Discovery ⚡ экспресс
Previously, it was thought that stars in all galaxies are born following the same 'template': always the same ratio of small to large ones. But data from the Gaia telescope showed that this is not the case. The makeup of the stellar 'population' depends on the conditions in the cloud and even on the era. So, is our Sun just one of many possible outcomes?
For a long time, the Universe was seen as a strict baker: it was thought that in every corner, stars were mixed from the same recipe — for each giant star, there were roughly the same number of dwarfs, no matter where they were born. This ratio was called the initial mass function, but checking it was tricky: to count all the buns in a faraway bakery, you need to see even the tiniest ones.
The Gaia satellite, armed with ultra-precise brightness measurements, peered into hundreds of open clusters — batches of star-formed ‘bakes’. It turned out that different galactic regions follow their own recipes: where gas and dust were denser and hydrogen was hotter, giants emerged several times more often. The Universe is more like a network of bakeries with distinct traditions than a single assembly line.
This simple fact changes a lot. For instance, estimates of the number of habitable planets and the distribution of dark matter in galaxies were based on the old assumptions. Now it’s clear: even the basic ingredients of the cosmos are mixed without a template, and astronomers have to rewrite their cookbooks.
🎯 The Sun is a middleweight, but the vast majority of stars in the Milky Way are dim red dwarfs, which live hundreds of times longer and shine hundreds of times fainter.