| Home. | Universe Galaxies And Stars Archives. | 
Universe Galaxies Stars logo.

Open star Clusters Die Young.

Ten Years Since The Revolution at Amazon.

SAS Black Ops at Amazon.
Amazon Kindle EBook Reader: Click For More Information.

NGC 1313.
NGC 1313. Image credit: Hubble.

Massive globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the Universe, held together by the collective gravity of their stars. Open star clusters, on the other hand, don't live so long.

This is according to new data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope. The space observatory was focused on barred spiral Galaxy NGC1313. It turned up a number of very young massive stars (B-type), which were flying solo through the galaxy. These stars are normally born in compact clusters, and they have a very short lifespans - rarely living beyond 25 million years.

So, these stars have been floating free in the galaxy, and they're not dead yet. That means the compact cluster they formed in has long come apart. And since B-type stars don't last longer than 25 million years, these clusters must come apart quickly.

But other stars in the cluster die even more quickly. The really large O-type stars are so massive they die as supernovae within a few million years ago. Long before the cluster has a chance to come apart. In fact, it might be these supernovae explosions that actually help speed up the clusters' disintigration.


Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys gleaned these new observations during a "Where's Waldo" search for blue stars tossed out of their open cluster "nest" in the nearby Galaxy known as NGC 1313.




A team led by Anne Pellerin of the Space telescope Science Institute in Baltimore used Hubble to observe the barred spiral Galaxy NGC 1313 and found that a large number of very young massive blue (B-type) stars are not associated with compact star clusters anymore. B stars burn out quickly due to the quick rate at which they use up Hydrogen fuel.

Because B stars have very short lives (a few tens of millions of years), the presence of a large number of massive B-type stars suggests to Astronomers that star clusters may dissolve very rapidly, within 25 million years. This is brief compared to the lifetime of the galaxy, which is measured in billions of years.

The rapid disintegration of open clusters is reinforced by the fact that the team found that the B stars are significantly more spread in the Galaxy than even the more massive O-type. The O stars are so short lived (a few million years or even less), they explode as supernovae before they can be scattered outside the cluster.





Ray Villard
Space telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Anne Pellerin
Space telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
(Phone: 410-338-4440; E-mail: pellerin@stsci.edu)

Source: Hubble News Release

  Print Version -   Print Article  

Universe - Galaxies and Stars: Links and Contacts

the web this site