Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Stars On Steroids
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have found a dazzling "super star cluster" shimmering with 500,000 brilliant young stars, some quite bizarre. The stars, many a thousand times bigger than the Sun, are packed like colorful marbles inside a tiny pocket of the Milky Way just six light years across. "If the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full moon," ESO scientists said.
The cluster, called Westerlund 1, contains thousands of "monster stars," orbs that would fill up the solar system all the way to Saturn's orbit. There are superhot Wolf-Rayet stars, even Yellow Hypergiants, a type of star never before seen in our galaxy and as bright as a million Suns.
The cluster is located in the southern skies in the constellation Ara, just 10,000 light years away. The Westerlund stars are all very young, 3.5 to 5 million years old. [Our Sun is 4.5 billion years old.] Astronomers hope to learn from them how massive stars form and die.
Since there are so many big stars so close together, some of them may collide and form black holes. Others will go supernova, as many as 1,500 over the next 40 million years.
The cluster was discovered in 1961. But most of its stars were hiding under a thick blanket of interstellar gas that was only recently pulled off with new generation of telescopes.
The cluster, called Westerlund 1, contains thousands of "monster stars," orbs that would fill up the solar system all the way to Saturn's orbit. There are superhot Wolf-Rayet stars, even Yellow Hypergiants, a type of star never before seen in our galaxy and as bright as a million Suns.
The cluster is located in the southern skies in the constellation Ara, just 10,000 light years away. The Westerlund stars are all very young, 3.5 to 5 million years old. [Our Sun is 4.5 billion years old.] Astronomers hope to learn from them how massive stars form and die.
Since there are so many big stars so close together, some of them may collide and form black holes. Others will go supernova, as many as 1,500 over the next 40 million years.
The cluster was discovered in 1961. But most of its stars were hiding under a thick blanket of interstellar gas that was only recently pulled off with new generation of telescopes.
