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Among the most striking objects in the universe are glittering, dense swarms of stars known as globular clusters. Astronomers had long thought globular clusters formed their millions of stars in bulk at around the same time, with each cluster’s stars having very similar ages, much like twin brothers and sisters.
Yet recent discoveries of young stars in old globular clusters have scrambled this tidy picture. Instead of having all their stellar progeny at once, globular clusters can somehow bear second or even third sets of thousands of sibling stars. Now a new study might explain these puzzling, successive stellar generations. The research team has for the first time found young populations of stars within globular clusters that have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. This method stands in contrast to the conventional idea of the clusters’ initial stars shedding gas as they age in order to spark future rounds of star birth.Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (geckzilla.com)
