2024-07-28 05:56:16
With a mass 10,000 times greater than that of the Sun, these “celestial monsters” would be five times hotter at their center (75 million °C) than the latter.
Researchers have found chemical traces of titanic stars inside globular clusters. These clusters are made up of tens of thousands to millions of stars, called “celestial monsters.”
These stars, the study notes, are among the oldest to have formed in our universe. About 180 globular clusters dot the Milky Way, and the age of these clusters in our galaxies is of great use to astronomers because they represent windows through time into the early years of existence.
Some of the stars in these clusters have very different proportions of elements (oxygen, nitrogen, sodium and aluminium) even though they formed at roughly the same time and from the same clouds of gas and dust more than 13 billion years ago, it added.
Astronomers believe that this elementary variety could be explained by the existence of supermassive stars.
These monsters are said to be between 5,000 and 10,000 times the size of the Sun. In addition, the fiery giants burned at temperatures of 75 million degrees Celsius. The largest, brightest and hottest stars are also those that die out the fastest. These cosmic monsters, identified by the scientists behind the study, have long since disappeared in extremely violent explosions called hypernovas.
To spot the scattered chemical residue of these celestial monsters, the researchers used JWST’s infrared camera to peer into the galaxy GN-z11, one of the most distant and oldest galaxies ever discovered. It is located 13.3 billion light-years from Earth.
After discovering these first clues, the scientists said they will now examine other globular clusters to see if their discovery can be repeated in other corners of the universe.
2024-07-28 05:56:16