Eruption of stars

This eruption of stars occurs every summer at the top of the Pech de Bugarach, famous Pyrenean peak of the Haute Vallée de l'Aude. It coincides with the appearance, on its southern face, of a long trail of gas and interstellar dust adorned with a multitude of bright spots sometimes grouped in clusters and nebulae: the Milky Way, or fraction of the disk of our galaxy.

For long, the nature and the origin of the Milky Way remained unknown: veritable grouping of celestial entities for some (Democritus, Ptolemy, Arab and Persian erudites), simple atmospheric phenomenon for others (Aristotle, Western Church). The progress of instrumentation will put a final end to this inconceivable duality: assisted by his telescope, Galileo Galilei discovered in 1610 that the Milky Way is indeed a very dense cloud of stars - while refuting the existence of the surrounding gas.

Two centuries later, the analogy between these distant stars and our Sun is established. In the twentieth century, the Solar System is located on the outskirts of our galaxy ...