Project to map the history of the Milky Way
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-history-milky.html
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 100 billion stars. Over the centuries, astronomers have scoured the skies, developing
a thorough understanding of the lives of those stars, from their formation in vast nebulae to their fiery and spectacular deaths.
But how has our galaxy changed over time? Where did the stars we see today form, and which of them are siblings, formed together
from the same cloud of material?
To answer these questions we need to perform Galactic archaeology. To do this, an ambitious Australian-led observing survey, called
Galah, is undertaking the immense task of capturing millions of rainbows to disentangle our galaxy's story.