TAG | Hubble observations challenge conventional theories |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Thursday, 03 May 2007 | |
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"The generally accepted view is that all of its stars originated at the same time and place, from the same material and have co-evolved for billions of years," said team member Luigi Bedin of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. "This is the cornerstone on which much of the study of stellar populations has been built. So we were very surprised to find several distinct populations of stars in NGC 2808." One possibility is that NGC 2808, being two or three times more massive than typical globular clusters, had sufficient gravity to retain the gases that would normally be blown into space during the first wave of star creation. Thus the raw materials remained for successive generations of stars. An alternative is that NGC 2808 is not a true globular cluster, but a dwarf galaxy captured and stripped of most of its material by the Milky Way.{moscomment}
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