JWST Finds Clues On Globular Cluster Origins: Formed By Monster Stars?

how wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing globular clusters mysterious formations such as the one that you see right here that even though were detected pretty much everywhere in the universe we still know so little about and still don't actually understand exactly how they formed and what's their relationship to the rest of the Galaxy and so in this video let's discuss

these unusual objects what we know about them and I guess more specifically discuss this recent discovery that might have found some of the initial Clues to their unusual origin but first what exactly are they now traditionally we think of them as a kind of a collection of stars inside a globular formation and very likely produced from the same giant molecular cloud which must have happened billions

of years ago and they all seem to be somewhat spherical in shape with all of the stars on the inside being bound together by gravity with a much higher concentration of stars near the center luckily we can actually explore some of them in space engine by even go going inside of them and on average the distance between stars is approximately one light year but as you

get closer the distance decreases with some of the Stars near the center being separated by approximately one third of a light year so obviously the nice guys in these particular regions will be very different but intriguingly because of the amount of stars here today the scientists believe that none of the Stars here probably contain any planets or in other words other stars would just destabilize all

of these planetary systems with the planets eventually being swallowed by something else or completely kicked out into the outer space although at least one planet has actually been discovered in a global cluster but in this case around the pulsar and it's also believed to be a planet that must have formed relatively recently but what's intriguing about these objects is that for the most part they all

contain population 2 stars or basically stars that are really old billions of years old and sometimes being almost as old as the universe or even older than the Galaxy naturally that's a bit of a mystery how can this unusual object that seems to orbit in a typical Galaxy even be older than the Galaxy itself and they generally also come in different sizes some of these objects

contain millions of stars inside and that's in contrast to other objects known as open clusters or molecular clouds which normally are not as perfectly shaped and contain a lot less stars for example here is a mosaic of several different open clusters would also look indifferent and all containing relatively different stars and I guess more intriguingly there are so many of these objects out there when it

comes to open clusters tens of thousands of them have already been found in a Milky Way But Global clusters are a lot more rare only just over 150 are known in the Milky Way and a few hundred are known in nearby galaxies as a matter of fact in the last few years the scientists have even identified unusual correlations between the number of global clusters and the

overall size of the central black hole as well as the overall age of the Galaxy here's why one of the older papers that you can find in the description that sort of deals with this in a little bit more detail and also pretty much all galaxies seem to contain them but they generally are located in different regions for example for spiral galaxies like the Milky Way

they're normally found in a Halo much farther away from the plane also intriguing for the Milky Way they all seem to orbit in the opposite direction but they're also somewhat different depending on the Galaxy for example in a large major mining Cloud a lot of global clusters seem to have a bimodal population or basically the Stars inside of those clusters were created during two different periods

it's quite possible that it was during two separate collisions the galaxy has received which basically enriched a lot of those clusters with new gas and so as a result it's usually possible to use Global clusters to study various galaxies where they orbit in other galaxies like the antenna galaxies you see right here some Global clusters even have their own clusters as in they seem to be

actually located in a certain region with much higher concentration and it's also been established that these seem to be a lot more prominent in galaxies with a lot of activities such as Starburst regions or interacting galaxies that are colliding and when it comes to really large galaxies such as the ones we usually refer to as elliptical galaxies there is a really strange connection between the total

mass of all clusters and the total mass of the supermassive black hole in the center for some reason it's usually more or less the same which of course creates a bit of a mystery that we cannot answer right now and this particular cluster behind me omega centuri was actually even known to ancient humans it's bright enough to be seen from planet Earth and it resembles a

kind of a strange summer diffuse star but it was obviously only a recent video we finally discovered exactly what this is but the question here is how do they actually form what's their origin story and that's a question that's very difficult to answer now because of the overall retrograde orbit of these objects and because they're also kind of ancient in the past it's been proposed that

maybe these are Ram islands of very old dwarf galaxies that collided with the Milky Way specifically galaxies like large and small magellanic clouds that you see right here that was stripped off all of the additional Stars leaving just a central region behind and though it might make sense for some of them it doesn't make sense for all of them or even most of them because a

lot of these clusters seem to be even older than the Galaxy itself likewise some of them like Omega Centauri you see right here or the cluster known as mayal 2 located in the Andromeda galaxy are enormously giant way more massive and larger than what we actually expect from a dwarf Galaxy Center and though some of them might contain some kind of an intermediate Mass black hole

in the center expected of a typical dwarf Galaxy for the most part the evidence so far is not really strong other studies suggested that maybe open clusters at some point become Global clusters specifically locations like westerland one you see right here sometimes referred to as Superstar clusters now they kind of resemble a global cluster but are just not very spherical yet and so it's definitely a

possibility with the other famous one being r136 located in the tarantula nebula and so there are quite a lot of stars here and some of them do seem to form a very thick formation but most of them will actually go supernova leaving no stars behind and so there's really no evidence to suggest that Global clusters are created from these smaller clusters especially because once again pretty

much most of them seem to be billions of years old we haven't found any Global clusters that were much much younger with the implication in this case being that maybe they no longer form and maybe they only form during a very certain region in the early Universe especially because none of them have any Star formation anymore and for most of them star formation happened billions of

years ago usually because of a collision with some kind of a galaxy and so this new study decided to focus on observations from one of the farthest galaxies known to us this actually to be a record holder known as GN z11 but the gene swap Space Telescope discovered galaxies even farther now in this galaxy there are signs of Google clusters that have been detected by the

James Webb and the recent analysis from this study you can find any description provides an intriguing potential explanation to the formation of these objects here it focuses on specific elements such as oxygen nitrogen and sodium recently seen by the telescope and here it was able to observe some of these elements in some of these ancient Global clusters now once again in this case we're looking at

something that's at the redshift of 10.6 so basically when the universe was only a few hundred million years old with this cluster only be in about tens of million years old so the Stars here are still forming still exploding and the cluster is still developing but the James web observations discovered a dense cluster of stars with a lot of star production and a huge amount of

nitrogen nitrogen that's usually not really seen in similar from formations in the nearby universe but nitrogen that in this case would suggest very specific type of supernova and star formation something that's expected from extremely massive stars what we would refer to as supermassive stars stars thousands of solar masses in Mass containing only hydrogen and helium on the inside and usually only living for a few hundred

thousand years now there is an older video in the channel that actually goes through a little bit more detail about these stars and why they most likely existed and what exactly they did in the early universe but in the natural these were the first stars in the entire universe behaving in a very different way compared to Modern stars and eventually exploding resulting in the production of

nitrogen that was just seen by the James Webb and more importantly forming a kind of a center or a gravitational Center for many of these clusters that would form around them and eventually as the Stars aged they might have released some of the material to the outside but also collapse in into a really massive black hole not super massive intermediate Mass black hole but massive enough

to form the center of mini clusters and so in this case this paper proposes that it was these super massive stars that existed for a few million years in the beginning of the universe that potentially served as the foundation for Global clusters implying that a lot of these clusters formed in a very similar way to larger galaxies but instead of having a supermassive black hole in

the center they have something a little bit smaller and a little bit less massive and something that started as a really massive star which by itself is a very intriguing proposition but will be somewhat difficult to prove because a lot more observations would be required from galaxies just as far away but the main implication here is of course that these are just remnants of the ancient

universe and the leftovers from the bygone age similar objects could not be formed anymore and were unlikely to see any more Global clusters forming anywhere around us and because we also don't expect a lot of planets here or a lot of planetary systems even the stars in these objects seem to be a little bit different from everything else but I guess that's the thing about GoPro

clusters even after years and years of studies we still know so little about them and they're still as mysterious as ever even though they're pretty much all over the place and all around us there's still very little understanding to what exactly they are how they formed and what's their connection to the rest of the Galaxy but at least for now that's all we know once we

have more details or once we know something else I'll follow this up with the next video Until then check out some of the previous videos in the description below subscribe share this with someone who has running about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by Julian Channel membership or by buying a wonderful person t-shirt you can

find in the description stay wonderful see you tomorrow and as always bye thank you [Music] foreign