IN AROUND 300 million years, the Milky Way will stage some dramatic fireworks when a giant burst of star formation gets under way.
Using a telescope at the South Pole, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have mapped cold molecular clouds surrounding the galactic centre. The observations suggest that the clouds have almost reached a critical density that will make them collapse, triggering a burst of star formation.
Many of the stars will be very massive and live only about a million years before dying in supernova explosions, which currently happen in our Galaxy only about…
