Star-Birth Myth 'Busted'

False-colour images of two galaxies, NGC 1566 (left) and NGC 6902 (right), showing their different proportions of very massive stars. Regions with massive O stars show up as white or pink, while less massive B stars appear in blue. NGC 1566 is much richer in O stars than is NGC 6902. The images combine observations of UV emission by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft and H-alpha observations made with the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) telescope in Chile. NGC 1566 is 68 million light years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. NGC 6902 is about 33 million light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2009) — An international team of researchers has debunked one of astronomy's long held beliefs about how stars are formed, using a set of galaxies found with CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.

When a cloud of interstellar gas collapses to form stars, the stars range from massive to minute.

Since the 1950s astronomers have thought that in a family of new-born stars the ratio of massive stars to lighter ones was always pretty much the same — for instance, that for every star 20 times more massive than the Sun or larger, you’d get 500 stars the mass of the Sun or less.

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