Astronomers Discover New Type of Star System

Astronomers Discover New Type of Star System

It took about 100 million years after the Big Bang for the Universe to create its first stars. Without them, nothing could ever be seen in our Cosmos, and nothing having eyes would possibly exist. In other words, the Universe would be completely dark and a total wasteland without stars. 

According to sci-news.com, Dr. Michael Jones, who’s a postdoctoral researcher with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, along with other scientists, found five blue star systems in the Virgo constellation. For their achievement, the astronomers used data gathered by the Hubble telescope, the Very Large Array Telescope of ESO, and NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.

The origin of the five blue star systems is unknown

The newfound star systems have a few traits that make them quite unique. They’re located hundreds of thousands of light-years away from any possible parent galaxy, they lack old stars, they contain very small amounts of hydrogen gas, and their young and blue stars are distributed in an irregular pattern. The stars’ systems isolation makes it very hard for astronomers to establish the origin of the cosmic objects.

However, since the stars are rich in metals, astronomers still propose a theory for how they might have formed. 

Dr. Jones explains as sci-news.com quotes:

To astronomers, metals are any element heavier than helium. This tells us that these stellar systems formed from gas that was stripped from a big galaxy, because how metals are built up is by many repeated episodes of star formation, and you only really get that in a big galaxy.

The same scientist also said, as the same source quotes:

Stars that are born red are lower mass and therefore live longer than blue stars, which burn fast and die young, so old red stars are usually the last ones left living,

And they’re dead because they don’t have any more gas with which to form new stars. These blue stars are like an oasis in the desert, basically.

Scientists estimate that in the entire observable Universe, there are about 200 billion trillion stars. Therefore, we may never know when even more types of stellar systems can be discovered!

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