A team of astrophysicists from Nanjing University and University of Bonn have demonstrated that, rather than being random, the mass of new stars born inside a star cluster is actually governed by a defined process of self-regulation. Their work has been published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
When a galaxy welcomes new stars, they are usually formed in star clusters inside vast gas clouds. While some of these stars inside such clusters are small, cool and dim, others possess 10 times the mass of our sun and a hundred thousand times higher brightness—but also a shorter lifespan as a result. These differences in initial mass have a significant influence on a galaxy’s luminosity.
“The total mass of a dwarf galaxy is relatively low, so it won’t produce any extremely massive stars that’d be brighter than our sun,” explains Professor Pavel Kroupa from the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. “By contrast, very massive elliptical galaxies, which formed almost 10 billion stars in just 10 million years during the early stage of the universe, generate millions of these ultra-bright stars.”
