Mysterious blue bobs are forming a new star system! Check it out

Universe has thousands of mysteries that are yet to be discovered, however, our scientists and researchers keep on studying and discovering new facts that often leave us surprised. In a recent development, scientists have stumbled upon a new type of stellar system — a collection of gravitationally bound stars that’s neither a galaxy nor a known type of star cluster. As reported by Space.com, five “blue blobs” composed of young blue stars have been found in the Virgo galaxy cluster while studying a catalog of gas clouds. Surprisingly, these stars were completely isolated from their parent galaxies, and were arranged in an irregular pattern.

Another unusual characteristic of this relatively new star system is the blobs have little atomic hydrogen gas, which is a crucial ingredient in star formation. However, Michael Jones, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona Steward Observatory and the lead author of this study said, “We observed that most of the systems lack atomic gas, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t molecular gas.” He shared that there must be some molecular gas as they are still forming stars. “The existence of mostly young stars and little gas signals that these systems must have lost their gas recently,” he explained.

The study further reveals that the new stellar systems are abundant in metals and hence we can believe that these stellar systems are formed from gas that was stripped from a big galaxy. Jones added, “how metals are built up is by many repeated episodes of star formation, and you only really get that in a big galaxy.” The researchers suspect that, over time, the stars in the blobs may get split into smaller stellar clusters and spread out.

Astronomers have discovered the observations via the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico and the Very Large Telescope in Chile.