Astronomers Have Discovered An Unexpectedly Large Number Of Massive Stars

A team of European astronomers detected in four distant galaxies a high number of massive stars, those that when formed have a mass greater than about 10 solar masses and whose calculation, using a carbon monoxide measurement technique, is key to understanding the formation and evolution of the universe.

According to an article published in the journal Science, this finding by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array telescopes (ALMA) in Chile, in four galaxies with stellar birth rates superior to those of a normal galaxy, was possible thanks to a technique similar to the one that allows to determine the age of objects with organic material from the amount of the radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. Read more.