Extremely massive stars forged the oldest star clusters in the universe (IMAGE)
Caption
On the left, an artist’s impression of a globular cluster near its birth, hosting extremely massive stars with powerful stellar winds that enrich the cluster with elements processed at extremely high temperatures. On the right, an ancient globular cluster as we observe it today: surviving low-mass stars retain traces of the winds from those extremely massive stars, which have since collapsed into intermediate-mass black holes.
Credit
Fabian Bodensteiner; background: image of the Milky Way globular cluster Omega Centauri, captured with the WFI camera at ESO’s La Silla Observatory.
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License
CC BY