Stellar population

During 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:[1]

The two types of stellar populations had been recognized among the stars of our own galaxy by Oort as early as 1926.

Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way showing Baade's general population categories. The blue regions in the spiral arms are composed of the younger population I stars, while the yellow stars in the central bulge are the older population II stars. In reality, many population I stars are also found mixed in with the older population II stars.

Baade noticed that bluer stars were strongly associated with the spiral arms, and yellow stars dominated near the central galactic bulge and within globular star clusters.[2] Two main divisions were defined as

  • Population I and
  • Population II,

with another newer, hypothetical division called

  • Population III

added in 1978; they are often simply abbreviated as Pop. I, Pop. II, and Pop. III.

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,[3] 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.[4][3]

By definition, each population group shows the trend where decreasing metal content indicates increasing age of stars. Hence, the first stars in the universe (very low metal content) were deemed population III, old stars (low metallicity) as population II, and recent stars (high metallicity) as population I.[5] The Sun is considered population I, a recent star with a relatively high 1.4% metallicity. Note that astrophysics nomenclature considers any element heavier than helium to be a "metal", including chemical non-metals such as oxygen.[6]

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