Astronomers have discovered signs of supermassive stars at the center of globular clusters born not long after the Big Bang.
are between 5,000 and 10,000 times as massive as the sun and are as hot as 135 million degrees Fahrenheit at their cores, compared to 27 million degrees F or so at the heart of. But, despite their intimidating size and fearsome temperatures, these stellar beasts are not always easy to locate. This is because they burn through their fuel for nuclear fusion quickly and thus have short lifespans.
"Globular clusters are between 10 and 13 billion years old, whereas the maximum lifespan of superstars is two million years," team member Mark Gieles, of the University of Barcelona, said in the same statement."They therefore disappeared very early from the clusters that are currently observable. Only indirect traces remain."
To spot signs of these supermassive stars, the study team turned to the infrared vision of JWST to try and catch globular clusters earlier in their existence. The powerful space telescope saw light emitted by one of the most distant and earliestfound to date, GN-z11. The galaxy is located around 13.3 billion light-years away, and JWST sees it as it was when it was just a few tens of millions of years old, making it a good choice as a hunting ground for young globular clusters.
Because chemical elements absorb and emit light at certain frequencies, the spectrum of light from cosmic sources contains"fingerprints" that point to the composition of celestial objects. The astronomers took light from GN-z11 seen by JWST and broke it down, finding two valuable pieces of information in the process.
"It has been established that it [GN-z11] contains very high proportions of nitrogen and a very high density of stars," said study team member Daniel Schaerer, an astronomy professor at the University of Geneva.
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