{"id":236960,"date":"2026-05-12T02:36:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T07:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/how-a-single-star-can-reshape-an-entire-galaxy"},"modified":"2026-05-12T02:36:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T07:36:52","slug":"how-a-single-star-can-reshape-an-entire-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/how-a-single-star-can-reshape-an-entire-galaxy","title":{"rendered":"How a single star can reshape an entire galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-a-single-star-can-reshape-an-entire-galaxy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers who simulate galaxies do not always get the same result, even when they start from identical conditions. New research from Leiden University shows that this is not a flaw, but a consequence of how galaxies behave\u2014and how they are modeled.<\/p>\n<p>The findings offer, for the first time, a way to address a long-standing question: how chaotic is a galaxy like the Milky Way really? The computer simulations by Tetsuro Asano and Simon Portegies Zwart (Leiden Observatory) will soon be published in <i>Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics<\/i> and are <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.12053\" target=\"_blank\">available<\/a> now on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers created hundreds of models of Milky Way-like galaxies: flat disks of stars, embedded in a large, invisible cloud of dark matter that holds the system together. In each experiment, they ran two almost identical simulations, differing by just one tiny detail\u2014for instance, a small shift in the position of a single star. Over time, that slight difference grows into visible structural changes: the spiral arms develop differently and the central bar rotates in another way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers who simulate galaxies do not always get the same result, even when they start from identical conditions. New research from Leiden University shows that this is not a flaw, but a consequence of how galaxies behave\u2014and how they are modeled. The findings offer, for the first time, a way to address a long-standing question: [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}