Mysterious ‘yellowballs’ littering the Milky Way are clusters of newborn stars

Seldom Bucket

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Scientists have cracked the case of mysterious cosmic objects dubbed “yellowballs.” The celestial specks mark the birthplaces of many kinds of stars with a wide range of masses, rather than single supermassive stars, researchers report April 13 in the Astrophysical Journal.


The stars in the clusters are relatively young, only about 100,000 years old. “I think of these as stars in utero,” says Grace Wolf-Chase, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute who is based in Naperville, Ill. For comparison, the massive stars forming in the Orion nebula are about 3 million years old, and the middle-aged sun is 4.6 billion years old.


Volunteers with the Milky Way Project first identified the objects while scouring pictures of the galaxy taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The now-defunct observatory saw the cosmos in infrared light, which let astronomers take a sort of stellar ultrasound “to probe what’s going on in these cold environments before the stars are actually born,” says Wolf-Chase.

 
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