Globular clusters: Survivors of a 13-billion-year-old massacre
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 - 12:32
in Astronomy & Space
Our Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by some 200 compact groups of stars, containing up to a million stars each. At 13 billion years of age, these globular clusters are almost as old as the universe itself and were born when the first generations of stars and galaxies formed. Now astronomers have conducted a novel type of computer simulation that looked at how they were born -- and they find that these giant clusters of stars are the only survivors of a 13-billion-year-old massacre that destroyed many of their smaller siblings.