Past Rates and Future Fates: A Galaxy's Tale

Right now, the Milky Way hosts about 100 billion stars and each year that number grows. The growth rate of new stars, however, is a sluggish crawl compared to what it was a few billion years ago, explained Dominik Riechers at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois.Riechers is an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University who studies galaxies and how they form and change over time. Galaxies are stellar factories, manufacturi...