What's My Age? Mystery Star Cluster has 3 Different Birthdays

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study the dimmest stars in open star cluster NGC 6791, astronomers uncovered three different age groups. Two of the populations are burned-out stars called white dwarfs. One group of these low-wattage stellar remnants appears to be 6 billion years old, another appears to be 4 billion years old. The ages are out of sync with those of the cluster's normal stars, which are 8 billion years old.

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