Hot Blue Stars and Their Scorching Temperatures in Clusters Explained

First Posted: Jun 24, 2015 08:26 AM EDT

When it comes to one particular type of star, "hot" doesn't even begin to explain how heated it becomes. Now, scientists have discovered the reason why small, unusually hot blue stars rise to scorching temperatures.

"We've solved an old puzzle," said Antonino Milone, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These stars are only half the mass of our sun yet we could not explain how they became so luminous. As the star was forming billions of years ago from a disc of gas in the congested center of the star cluster, another star or stars must have collided with the disc and destroyed it."

These so-called blue hook stars are both brilliant and hot. In this particular case, the ones that the researchers studied were located in the globular Omega Centauri, the only cluster visible to the naked eye. This cluster contains about 10 million stars huddled close to one another.

The researchers created a model of this cluster. This revealed that the formation of stars doesn't all occur at once. Instead, it's likely that the blue stars form in a second generation of star formation.

Usually, the large disc of ionized gas around a newly-forming star locks its rotation through magnetic effects. In blue hook stars, though, an early destruction of its disc allows the star to spin up as the gas comes together to form a star. Because of this high rotation rate, the star consumes its hydrogen fuel more slowly and evolves differently throughout its life.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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Tagsclusters, Globular Cluster, star, Stars, Evolution