One would think that to build the biggest stars, you need a really big star factory, like a bubbling and churning stellar nursery stuffed full of plump baby stars gulping down as much nebulous gas a possible. However, according to a University of Michigan study, some of the biggest stars can reach a ripe, massive age in isolation.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the Michigan astrophysicists analyzed eight stellar monsters -- each 20 to 150 times the mass of the sun -- in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is one of the Milky Way's nearest galactic neighbors.
Five of the massive stars had no neighboring stars and the other three lived in small clusters of ten or less stars. This finding suggests this sample of stars grew fat in a region of space with few stellar siblings.
Using one of the better analogies I've read in a press release, Joel Lamb, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy, likened these big stellar loners in small clusters to big fish in small ponds.
"My dad used to fish in a tiny pond on his grandma's farm," Lamb said. "One day he pulled out a giant largemouth bass. This was the biggest fish he's caught, and he's fished in a lot of big lakes. What we're looking at is analogous to this. We're asking: 'Can a small pond produce a giant fish? Does the size of the lake determine how big the fish is?'"
"Our results show that you can, in fact, form big stars in small ponds."
Read more at Discovery News
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