00:00Far away from the city lights in the NSW central west, this telescope has spent the past decade
00:09observing close to a million stars.
00:12It's part of a project called GALAR, although it's anything but foolish.
00:17Our big idea is to try to use stars as our fossils to trace back how the Milky Way formed
00:23and evolved.
00:24GALAR stands for Galactic Archaeology Using Hermes, the spectrograph seen here.
00:30The Australian-led project has just released the chemical fingerprints of more than 900,000 stars.
00:36So we take the light from each star and we split it up by wavelength, like with a prism,
00:39but extremely precise.
00:41This is what that looks like for Alpha Centauri A. The unique barcodes on the rainbow show
00:46what elements are inside.
00:48And this is the data from Methuselah's star.
00:50It has significantly fewer barcodes, meaning significantly fewer heavy elements.
00:55It's allowing scientists to piece together simulations like this, showing the hypothesised
01:00evolution of the Milky Way.
01:02And only if we have all of the measurements, we can go to the simulators, to the theorists
01:07and ask them, can you check that?
01:09There's so much more to learn.
01:11The data gathered here will lay the groundwork for research well into the future, not to
01:15mention right now, under the Milky Way, tonight.
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