The orbital telescope "Hubble" has received photos of the globular cluster NGC 362 in the outskirts of the galaxy, which is inhabited by an abnormally young stars to the periphery of the Milky Way, which usually live very mature view of our galaxy, according to the Space Telescope site.
Gilles Chapdelaine/NASA & ESA
Globular clusters are close "family" of a few tens or hundreds of thousands of stars that exist in the outskirts of galaxies. It is believed that most of them formed in the distant past, which is supported by a large number of red dwarfs and stellar "remains" - neutron stars and white dwarfs within them.
Age of the oldest of them, judging by the individual luminaries in such clusters, closer to the time of the Big Bang, or even exceed it, which is controversial among scientists.
Globular Cluster NGC 362, located at 27 thousand light-years from Earth in the constellation Tucana, is an exception to this unwritten rule - it lights noticeably younger than the typical stars in these clusters. Their age, as shown by the latest images and spectral data from the "Hubble" is "only" 11 billion years old, not 13 billion years, like the other stars in the globular clusters.
© NASA/ CXC/IASF Palermo/M.Del Santo et al; NASA/STScI
This discovery is a surprise to scientists, because before that, astronomers believed that the globular clusters are peculiar remnants of the "star of building materials", of which the Milky Way was formed about 13 billion years ago. Suddenly a small age NGC 362 and a high proportion of astronomical "metals" - elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - in his stars indicate that globular clusters can be created in other ways that have yet to be discovered.