KIAA/NWU: Making New Stars by ‘Adopting’ Stray Cosmic Gases

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KIAA/NWU: Making New Stars by ‘Adopting’ Stray Cosmic Gases

Post by bystander » Wed Jan 27, 2016 10:28 pm

Stellar Parenting: Giant Star Clusters Make New Stars by 'Adopting' Stray Cosmic Gases
Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University | Northwestern University | 2016 Jan 27
[img3="A portrait of the massive globular cluster NGC 1783 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A new study suggests the globular cluster swept up stray gas and dust from outside the cluster to give birth to three different generations of stars.
A Youthful Cluster - Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA"]http://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/ ... w1534a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
Among the most striking objects in the universe are the dense, glittering swarms of stars known as globular clusters. Astronomers had long thought globular clusters formed their millions of stars in bulk at around the same time, with each cluster's stars having very similar ages, much like twin brothers and sisters. Yet the recent discoveries of young stars within old globular clusters have scrambled this tidy picture.

Instead of having all their stellar progeny at once, globular clusters can somehow bear second or even third sets of thousands of sibling stars. Now a new study led by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University, and including astronomers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), Northwestern University, and the Adler Planetarium, might explain these puzzling, successive stellar generations.

Using observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, the research team has for the first time found young populations of stars within globular clusters that have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. This method stands in contrast to the conventional idea of the clusters' initial stars shedding gas as they age in order to spark future rounds of star birth. ...

Formation of new stellar populations from gas accreted by massive young star clusters - Chengyuan Li et al
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