Aug 03, 2015 03:50 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A multi-institutional team of researchers released a new study detailing how a high volume of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy change their course.

The study authors, who published their work in The Astrophysical Journal, collaborated to examine data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

"In our modern world, many people move far away from their birthplaces, sometimes halfway around the world," study lead author Michael Hayden, an astronomy graduate student at New Mexico State University, said in a press release. "Now we're finding the same is true of stars in our galaxy - about 30 percent of the stars in our galaxy have traveled a long way from where they were born.

"From the chemical composition of a star, we can learn its ancestry and life history."

Working with scientists from around the country and the globe, Hayden and his colleagues detailed a new, updated map of the Milky Way based on observations made over the last six years.

"We were able to measure the properties of nearly 70,000 stars in our Galaxy for this particular study using the innovative SDSS infrared spectrograph," study co-author Donald Schneider, a distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, said in a press release. "This exercise can be described as Galactic archeology. These data reveal the locations, motions, and compositions of the stars, which provide insights into their formation and their history."

(Sources: New Mexico State University, Penn State University)

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