Mystery star cluster has 3 different birthdays

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study the dimmest stars in the cluster, astronomers uncovered three different age groups. Two of the populations are dead  stars called white dwarfs. One group of these stellar remnants appears to be 6 billion years old, another appears to be 4 billion years old. The ages are out of sync with those of the cluster’s normal stars, which are 8 billion years old.

“The age discrepancy is a problem because stars in an open cluster should be the same age. They form at the same time within a large cloud of interstellar dust and gas. So we were really puzzled about what was going on,” explained astronomer Luigi Bedin.

~ by darkpanther14 on August 8, 2008.