Showing posts with label Hubble Telescope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hubble Telescope. Show all posts

Blue Straggler Stars Found in the Milky Way Bulge

We now know that dark matter exists. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has also identified blue straggler stars in the Milky Way. These stars don't show their age. Their color hides their true age. This is the first time they have been found in the core of the Milky Way.

Not much is known about blue stragglers. Accepted theory is that they develop from binary pairs. The larger of the pair strips material from the smaller one. Hydrogen is activated which causes the larger star to undergo nuclear fission thus making the star blue.

Blue stragglers are rare in the Milky Way because the central bulge of the system stopped making new stars billions of years ago. Aging stars and cool red dwarfs exist in the Milky Way now. Giant blue stars were thought to have exploded into supernovae in the distant past. The presence of blue stragglers throws a spanner into the works of current models of star formation.
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Science