Astronomers have observed that millions of young stars are shaping up in mysterious hot and dusty gas cloud in the nearby galaxy known as NGC 5253, in the constellation Centaurus.
The star cluster is buried within a supernebula in a dwarf galaxy known as NGC 5253, in the constellation Centaurus. The cluster has one billion times the luminosity of our sun, but was invisible in ordinary light, hidden by its own hot gases.
The amount of dust surrounding the stars was extraordinary, approximately 15,000 times the mass of our sun in elements such as carbon and oxygen.
The cluster was about 3 million years old, which in astronomical terms, was remarkably young. It was likely to live for more than a billion years.
How much of a gas cloud gets turned into stars varies in different parts of the universe. In the Milky Way, the rate for gas clouds the size of Cloud D was less than 5 percent. In Cloud D, the rate was at least 10 times higher and perhaps much more.
Jean Turner, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College and her colleagues conducted the research with the Submillimeter Array, a joint project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.
Also Read
NGC 5253 has hundreds of large star clusters, including at least several that are young, the astronomers reported.
The most spectacular was found within Cloud D.
The cluster contains more than 7,000 massive "O" stars, the most luminous of all known stars, each a million times brighter than our sun.
NGC 5253 has approximately nine times as much dark matter as visible matter, a much higher rate than the inner parts of the Milky Way.