Universe and space travel

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have come across a ‘pearl necklace’ of stars. The stars are connected by ‘strings’ of gas. The whole stretches over thousands of light years, reports space agency NASA.

It concerns twelve different galaxies that are connected by their tails. These tails are formed because the galaxies pull on each other with their gravity. This indicates that the galaxies will one day collide.

Thanks to the Hubble telescope, another 425 bundles of young stars have been found in the tails. Each cluster contains an estimated one million stars. Some of these are less than ten million years old and are therefore called baby stars.

According to NASA, the ‘string of pearls’ proves that a collision of galaxies is not actually a collision, but a merger. No stars are destroyed, but new stars are created.

“It’s surprising to find so many young objects in the tails. That tells us a lot about how galaxies form and can merge,” said lead researcher Michael Rodruck. “This process creates a new generation of stars that would otherwise never have existed.”

2024-02-12 12:31:38
#Hubble #telescope #finds #clusters #stars #form #string #pearls #Science

Jan 27, 2024 at 12:16 am

Astronomers have discovered a new type of star at the center of the Milky Way. It is a variant of a red giant that spews clouds of gas.

Researchers discovered the star species in a study of the starry sky published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. For this they used a telescope that works with infrared radiation. By using infrared, the researchers managed to see stars that are barely visible through other telescopes, due to clouds of dust and gas hanging in front of the stars.

The scientists discovered, among other things, 21 stars that looked like red giants. These are stars that are in the final phase of their life and swell and take on a red color. The stars found have the remarkable property that they were less bright during some periods.

Closer examination shows that this is because the stars spew out gas clouds. Due to the similarity to a cloud puffed out by smokers, scientists have nicknamed the stars “old smokers”.

The stars were located in the innermost part of the Milky Way, where stars are often composed of heavier elements compared to other places in our galaxy. For this reason, scientists say it is easier for small particles to escape from the gas layers on the outside of the red giants. But how exactly this happens is still a mystery to scientists.

“Matter released from old stars plays an important role in the life cycle of elements and helps to form new stars and planets,” says Professor Philiop Lucas, who leads the research team. Researchers believe the discovery of the “ancient smokers” could contribute to knowledge of how elements spread through the Milky Way.

Beeld: Philip Lucas/University of Hertfordshire

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Universe and space travelScience
2024-01-26 23:16:53
#Scientists #discover #hidden #star #species #spews #gas #clouds #Tech #Science

Jan 13, 2024 at 3:59 PM Update: 2 hours ago

The formation of stars has not changed in the past ten billion years, astronomers note with surprise. According to them, it comes down to one thing: hot gas can or cannot cool down quickly. That is evident from it largest research to star formation someday.

“What’s surprising here is that there are a lot of things that could have influenced star formation over the last ten billion years,” said lead researcher Michael Calzadilla of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to him, the main driver behind star formation in large galaxies comes down to one thing: whether or not the hot gas around them can cool quickly enough.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest objects in the universe. These are held together by gravity and contain enormous amounts of hot gas. The mass of that hot gas is gigantic: several times the total mass of all stars that occur in galaxy clusters. That hot gas turns out to be the linchpin in the process of star formation.

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Threshold value appears to be decisive for star formation

The researchers studied the brightest cluster galaxies in the universe. These bright galaxies are very massive and are located at the center of 95 galaxy clusters 3.4 to 9.9 billion light-years away from Earth.

The team discovered that star formation in those galaxies is triggered when the amount of movement in the hot gas falls below a critical threshold. The hot gas inevitably cools below that threshold and forms new stars. This threshold value therefore indicates whether or not stars are formed.

“It’s impressive to think that a single number tells us whether billions of stars and planets have formed in these massive galaxies, going back ten billion years,” the researchers say.

‘Cosmic noon’ actually still exists

Previous results suggested that factors other than the cooling of hot gas could play a larger role in star formation.

Ten billion years ago, during a period astronomers call “cosmic noon,” collisions and mergers of galaxies into clusters became much more common. Stars were also formed faster and black holes in a galaxy attracted material much faster.

Still, the star formation now studied looks remarkably similar to that from the cosmic noon. “Although the universe looked very different then, the basis of star formation, the critical threshold, has always remained the same in these galaxies.”

2024-01-13 14:59:12
#Largest #study #star #formation #process #appears #billion #years #Tech #Science