Stellar population

Uncommon card · No. 129667

In 1944, Walter Baade categorized groups of stars within the Milky Way into stellar populations. In the abstract of the article by Baade, he recognizes that Jan Oort originally conceived this type of classification in 1926. Baade observed that bluer stars were strongly associated with the spiral arms, and yellow stars dominated near the central galactic bulge and within globular star clusters. Two main divisions were deemed population I and population II stars, with another newer, hypothetical division called population III added in 1978. Among the population types, significant differences were found with their individual observed stellar spectra. These were later shown to be very important and were possibly related to star formation, observed kinematics, stellar age, and even galaxy evolution in both spiral and elliptical galaxies. These three simple population classes usefully divided stars by their chemical composition, or metallicity. In astrophysics nomenclature metal refers to all...

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