NASA
There may be more big stars out there than we thought. A study of part of the Large Magellanic Cloud found significantly more huge stars than we would expect to see, which could mean that there are more supernovae and black holes too.
In our galactic neighbourhood, all newborn stars seem to follow the same distribution of masses. There are lots of stars about 15 times the mass of the sun, and exponentially fewer stars with higher masses.
“Stars are formed in a variety of masses, and that distribution follows a well-known relation that’s observed everywhere we look, which is kind of odd and we’re not exactly sure why stars follow that relation,” says Don Figer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
But when Fabian Schneider at Oxford University and his colleagues measured the