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Space Telescope Reveals Weird Star Cluster Conundrum
astroengine (1577233) writes "We thought we had star formation mechanisms pinned down, but according to new observations of two star clusters, it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar. When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges. However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true: 'Our findings are counterintuitive,' said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. 'It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'"
A couple of billion years ago, stars *did* form from the gravitational collapse of vast clouds of dust and gas. But around that time, the Tenctonese in Andromeda went through their 3D printing revolution and ever since then, most stars are 3D printed. It's the future, and only Luddites would think otherwise.
I don't care how fucking convenient and dramatic it sounds to imply that effectively, "we thought we knew almost everything" about a subject - in the eyes of doubters of science, this is taken literally and used to discredit science, time and time again.
Why write that shit? To the untrained eye it says "this just in: science WRONG again!".
This reminds me of one of favorite Isaac Asimov quotes:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny..."
I hope this leads them to go get more data in addition to thinking harder and coming up with ideas.
Someone should tell Ken Ham that, again, one scientific prediction about the universe suggested to not hold for all possible cases. Therefore Jesus.
it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar.
A shining example of +1 Punny.
The findings once again neatly confirm cosmologists' standard theory of the basic ingredients of the universe and how it evolved from s/ash.
it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar.
Physicists (whether it be on the cosmos or climate change) are starting to sound like Richard Nixon spin doctors. Which is it? Because I know where my money is - they don't know..and therefore should stop claiming they do. I'd like a lot more funding for experimental physics and a lot less for the theoretical variety, at least until it deserves funding.
Intuition often follows popular knowledge found in different fields. The distribution of ages of stars in a star cluster are not following the popular notion of growth-rings in a tree trunk cross-section. They might be explained by a uniform distribution of nova that collectively push the bulk of gas debris farther away from the center of the star cluster than the edge of the cluster. Now consider our solar system with its giant gas-planets farther away from the sun. It makes sense that the inner part of the star cluster blew itself out the same way lighter elements blew out farther from our sun. This might make a higher concentration of gas debris in the outter part of the star cluster that should collapse into making more stars sooner than the lower concentration of debris remaining in the inner part of the star cluster, which would have to wait for gas to either fall back into the center of gravity of the star cluster or wait for the higher concentration of outter stars to push their nova debris back toward the center of the star cluster to form new stars. This is a star cluster formation rebound. If this is true, then the star formation rebounding may be part of an oscillation that if compared to other star clusters may identify a frequency formula that could determine the age of the star cluster and the probability of new star formation within a star cluster. This may lead to explain other great attractive forces in the universe.
Cue the electric universe people to come tell us their magnetic-dynamo repulsion theory.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
It's Mitt's planet Kolob, it flip-flopped
All they need to do is look at a virtual universe and figure it out because they know what they are doing.
Astrophysicists Build Realistic Virtual Universe
Of course they need to re-evaluate how our sun was formed. It' 5000 years old!
Curiously yours, crip.
That's why the older stars are on the outside, it's not gravitational collapse gets enough mass together in a hurry, it's shockwaves from nearby bangs.
Can we have one science article that doesn't essentially say "everything we ever knew is wrong"... stop sensationalizing this crap. It's more than just annoying, it's anti-intellectualist
This just proofs that science is not a religion, it is not expected to have all the answers.
If you think it should have then you are pretty clueless about it.
Science is a set of proven methods bro. You want to be talking about a hypothesis, or even a theory or the biased and faulty interpretation of data. Nice to see a dissenting opinion though
Edison and Jesus both operated under broadly defined principles. But when I turn on a light bulb, I don't read a physics handbook. And when I feed the poor I don't consult the Bible first.
Now, Jesus knew that man does not live by bread alone, and Edison knew that inventing stuff costs money. But both of them spent more time working on the problem than talking about it.
Which really doesn't have anything to do with your point, because Slashdot.
If I have a spinning thing, and objects form near the center then get spun out I would observe both affects discussed here.
A) objects form near the center
B) older objects are toward the outside (younger objects near the center)
Since we've been observing expansion of the galaxy it would be logical to assume "these things expand in general". I don't see a problem.
So in conclusion, the assumption that older objects would be in the center was the flawed logic.
I refuse to sign
Nice to see a dissenting opinion though
THAT is a dissenting opinion? It would be nice to see an informed or even weakly argued opinion that goes beyond "nyaa-nyaa."
I have always wondered if we would find out we are wrong about star mechanics. If this is enough of a problem that the process of star birth ends up being heavily revised, I am left wondering if we will also have to revise our theories on the properties of a main sequence star, and star death. It is said that the current estimate for the sun's ability to sustain life on Earth is around a billion years and that it will puff up and finally go nova in about five-billion years. It would be disappointing to find out that the life of our sun is overestimated by five-billion years.
Anyway, I am really not qualified to even have that thought, but at least it would probably make for a good science-fiction story.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Then we physicist put our own spin on it :).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The day that science has all the answers all the time will be a very sad day indeed. Half of the fun of science is finding new things and saying "That shouldn't be doing that..." (Of course, while science doesn't have *all* the answers, it is much closer to the answers than anything else we have.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Does anyone understand why this conventional wisdom took hold?
These are open clusters. Over time, stars will leave the region of their birth. That would suggest to me that the oldest stars would be on the edges, and the newest, in the center, which was exactly what was observed. So why, exactly, was the prior belief the opposite?
Believing that no gods exist does not necessitate the belief that science (or anything else for that matter) can come up with "all of the answers".
Happy people make bad consumers.
The article states ...
"Thirdly, the young stars could be formed in the cluster’s center by filaments of gas and dust that fall into the center of the cluster. This could be envisaged as a sort of “conveyer belt” effect where older stars are replaced in the core by new stars being created by in-falling material."
Why would dust form into filaments based upon the force of gravity? What keeps the filaments together?
To make a filament, you generally need rotation. And to get the rotation, you need a magnetic field. And since magnetic fields generally go hand-in-hand with electric currents, you might as well call these filaments a plasma.
I'm not going to push this too much as it's an astro heresy ... but I found it an interesting read:
http://www.haltonarp.com/articles
I'm guessing the answer lies within the way that dark matter and the higgs field interact with each other, thus assisting in the accretion process while gravity pulls the gas in and voila! A start is born.
Why are the stars on the outer edge younger, because the Dark Matter is building up all around the gaseous nebulae. I'm betting that the finding in the article is a fluke of sorts in that the build up of Dark Matter around a Gaseous body is random in a sense and dependent upon gravitational forces from nearby bodies.
I'm curious to see what the Math will show about why the stars are younger at the outer edge of these Nebulae.
According to /. moderation, it's "insightful". Very different from "funny" - it means Hazem is gaining karma for posting something positive and meaningful.
Science figures it out. Engineers figure out how to use it without burning our fingers.
Who thought science had all the answers? I don't know anybody who thinks that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Conventional thinking suggests that " ...stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges. "???
if new stars are being generated from the center and the cluster is expanding wouldn't "conventional thinking" suggest that young stars would be at the inside of the elder stars?
But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:
At least, that's where he wants users of his hostfile manager to send him money.
But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:
At least, that's where he wants users of his hostfile manager to send him money.