Strange stars:<\/p>\n
\nStars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes.
\nThe finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda’s center. But it generates a new puzzle: The stars’ phenomenal orbital velocity suggests they should never have formed in the first place.
\nAstronomers first spotted the blue light near Andromeda’s core in 1995. Three years later, another group determined that the light emanated from a cluster of hot, young stars. Nobody knew how many were involved.
\nNew data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal more than 400 blue stars that formed in a burst of activity roughly 200 million years ago, astronomers said.
\nThe stars are packed into a disk that is just 1 light-year across.
\nThat’s amazingly compact by cosmic standards. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). The nearest star to our Sun is about 4.3 light-years away.
\nUnlikely setup
\n“The blue stars in the disk are so short-lived that it is unlikely in the long 12-billion-year history of Andromeda that such a short-lived disk would appear now,” said Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. “We think that the mechanism that formed this disk of stars probably formed other stellar disks in the past and will trigger them again in the future. We still don’t know, however, how such a disk could form in the first place. It still remains an enigma.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe problem with science fiction is that whenever you read articles like this, and you see some strange configuration of stars in a cool locale, you immediately think…”Aliens!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Strange stars: Stars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes. The finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda’s center. But it generates a new puzzle: … <\/p>\n