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Yuen Yiu, Staff Writer
(Inside Science) Scientists have figured out a way to look into our galactic past and the proposed method is literally groundbreaking: It involves digging up salt crystals from miles underground. A paper describing the approach was recently published in
Physical Review Letters.
Digging deep for our galactic past
Typically, astronomers look into the past by staring deep into space and observing light that has taken billions of years to arrive from faraway galaxies and even the Big Bang itself.
But how do we study the history of something that is more nearby say, within the Milky Way Galaxy, which is only a hundred thousand light-years across? Or our sun, which is only eight light-minutes away?