Stars Found Near Black Hole |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Friday, 13 May 2005 11:41 |
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Using the Keck I telescope in Hawaii, Jessica Lu and her colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles have found a second group of stars very close to the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This group is only 0.26 light-years away. They seem to be about 10 million years old, and they do not seem to be held together by a smaller black hole. How these stars exist is a puzzle because the gravity of the giant black hole should have torn apart the dust and gas from which new stars form.
Astronomers found a cluster of young stars 0.7 light-years from the black hole two years ago. It is possible that this cluster formed further out in the galaxy and migrated inward, held together from within by a middleweight black holes gravity.
Lu thinks that the newly discovered stars might be the remnants of a larger cluster that formed further out and was stripped of most of its stars as it spiraled toward the black hole. Another possibility she states is that stars may able to form near the Milky Ways supermassive black hole, using a process that is very foreign to what we now think of as star formation.
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