een man afval is een andere man schat

// 27 . 09 . 2016 //

Astronomers have discovered a new family of stars in the centre of the Milky Way, which they’re calling N-rich stars, because of their unusually high levels of nitrogen.

Not only do these strange new stars deepen our understanding of what lies at the heart of our own galaxy, their discovery could shed light on how globular clusters - strange, spherical groups of stars that orbit the centre of a galaxy - formed during the creation of the Milky Way some 13.2 billion years ago.

“This is a very exciting finding that helps us address fascinating questions such as what is the nature of the stars in the inner regions of the Milky Way, how globular clusters formed, and what role they played in the formation of the early Milky Way - and by extension the formation of other galaxies,” said lead researcher Ricardo Schiavon, from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.