Astronotes: Lone Stars Born in Surprising Isolation
January 17
Lone Stars Born in Surprising Isolation
Stars typically form inside galaxies and in predictable locations. So astronomers were surprised to find massive stars being born in isolated regions of space, in a small cloud of gas on the far outskirts of a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster.
The cluster of galaxies, about 50 million light-years from Earth, is held together by unseen and mysterious dark matter, astronomers say, and the space between the galaxies is permeated by hot gas. A few lone older stars had been previously found in the "intracluster space" of Virgo, and had presumably been given gravitational boots by the various galaxies long ago.
The newly spotted hot, young stars are developing about 82,000 light-years away from the primary star-formation regions of the nearest galaxy in the cluster. The observations were made by the Japanese Subaru telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and led by Ortwin Gerhard at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
The findings show that stars can indeed form in isolated regions of a galaxy, and possibly also in intracluster space, Gerhard and his colleagues said Thursday. The stars are much more massive than our Sun and will live short lives, punctuated by explosive ends that will litter the Virgo Cluster with fresh metals.