CASPER
New member
The tiny motions of hundreds of young stars packed tightly inside a star cluster have been revealed for the first time by images from the Hubble Space Telescope taken a decade apart.
The stars did not settle down as astronomers expected, but continued to roam about restlessly for about1 million years after the star cluster's formation, according to the new photos, which were released Wednesday.
"This is the first time we have been able to measure precise stellar motions in such a compact young star cluster," said Wolfgang Brandner, an astronomer at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
The precisely-measured motions of more than 700 cluster stars in the nebula NGC 3603 showed that the star velocities remained independent of their mass, which reflects conditions from the time of the cluster's initial formation.
The young star cluster packs a mass of more than 10,000 times that of our sun within a region just three light-years wide. It sits about 20,000 light-years from Earth. One light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers.
The stars did not settle down as astronomers expected, but continued to roam about restlessly for about1 million years after the star cluster's formation, according to the new photos, which were released Wednesday.
"This is the first time we have been able to measure precise stellar motions in such a compact young star cluster," said Wolfgang Brandner, an astronomer at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
The precisely-measured motions of more than 700 cluster stars in the nebula NGC 3603 showed that the star velocities remained independent of their mass, which reflects conditions from the time of the cluster's initial formation.
The young star cluster packs a mass of more than 10,000 times that of our sun within a region just three light-years wide. It sits about 20,000 light-years from Earth. One light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers.
