It was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015, and until recently held the record of oldest observed galaxy. They found them in the galaxy GN-z11, which is more than 13 billion light years away-the light we see from it comes from just 440 million years after the Big Bang. This discarded "pollution" will in turn feed young forming stars, giving them a greater variety of chemicals the closer they are to the supermassive star, she added.īut the team still needed observations to back up their theory. It would eventually become "like a huge nuclear reactor, continuously feeding on matter, which will eject out a lot of it," she added. They theorize that these huge stars are born from successive collisions in the tightly packed globular clusters.Ĭorinne Charbonnel, an astrophysicist at the University of Geneva and lead author of the study, told AFP that "a kind of seed star would engulf more and more stars". So the researchers came up with a possible solution: a rampaging supermassive star shooting out chemical "pollution". That is far above the temperature that the stars are thought to get up to at their core, around the 15-20 million Celsius mark which is similar to the Sun. Many of the stars have elements that would require colossal amounts of heat to produce, such as aluminum which would need a temperature of up to 70 million degrees Celsius. Our Milky Way galaxy, which has more than 100 billion stars, has around 180 globular clusters.īut the question remains: Why do the stars in these clusters have such a variety of chemical elements, despite presumably all being born around the same time, from the same cloud of gas? The clusters, which are mostly very old, can contain millions of stars in a relatively small space.Īdvances in astronomy have revealed an increasing number of globular clusters, which are thought to be a missing link between the universe's first stars and first galaxies. The team of European researchers behind the study previously theorized the existence of supermassive stars in 2018 in an attempt to explain one of the great mysteries of astronomy.įor decades, astronomers have been baffled by the huge diversity in the composition of different stars packed into what are called globular clusters. So far, the largest stars observed anywhere have a mass of around 300 times that of our Sun.īut the supermassive star described in a new study has an estimated mass of 5,000 to 10,000 Suns.
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