Hubble Captures Stars Moving Oddly

The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of a super dense cluster of newly forming stars 10 years apart, and documented the baby stars moving in surprising ways. The cluster is 20,000 light years from the sun and a (relatively) young 1.4 million years old. Scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy studied the images and found the stars moving independently of their mass, which is causing astronomers to reconsider how they think star clusters are born and grow and how to estimate clusters’ mass. The estimates are often based on stars calming down and reaching “virial equilibrium”—a star’s mass may be overestimated if it hasn’t reached that state.