D-Bone
Jun 13th '06, 03:23 PM
Astronomers have uncovered a frenzy of star forming activity in the dusty cores of two merging galaxies 250 million light-years away.
With the aid of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers spied more than 200 mammoth star clusters in Arp 220, an uber-galaxy in the constellation Serpens that is forming as the result of a galactic collision that began about 700 million-years ago.
The star clusters are packed into a very small region only about 5,000 light-years across. The biggest cluster contains nearly 10 million suns worth of matter and is twice as massive as any star cluster ever discovered in the Milky Way Galaxy.
"This is star birth in the extreme," said study team member Christine Wilson of the McMasterUniversity in Canada. "This is a nearby look at a phenomenon that was common in the early universe, when many galaxies were merging."
The clusters are so compact that even though they lie only a moderate distance away, they look like single stars. What gives them away as star clusters, however, is that they shine brighter than any single star would at that distance.
Read More: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060613_hyper_nursery.html
With the aid of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers spied more than 200 mammoth star clusters in Arp 220, an uber-galaxy in the constellation Serpens that is forming as the result of a galactic collision that began about 700 million-years ago.
The star clusters are packed into a very small region only about 5,000 light-years across. The biggest cluster contains nearly 10 million suns worth of matter and is twice as massive as any star cluster ever discovered in the Milky Way Galaxy.
"This is star birth in the extreme," said study team member Christine Wilson of the McMasterUniversity in Canada. "This is a nearby look at a phenomenon that was common in the early universe, when many galaxies were merging."
The clusters are so compact that even though they lie only a moderate distance away, they look like single stars. What gives them away as star clusters, however, is that they shine brighter than any single star would at that distance.
Read More: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060613_hyper_nursery.html