
A river of stars discovered in the cosmic neighborhood
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of what was called a river of stars, a stream of stars a little over 300 light years away from us that occupies most of the southern sky. Astronomers of the University of Vienna used information collected by ESA’s Gaia space probe and published in the so-called Data Release 2 (DR2) to discover at least 4,000 stars that have been moving together in space since their formation, which was about a billion years ago.