The researchers' simulations, taking MOND into consideration, could explain a lot. "Newton’s theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width." "However, the first is much narrower than the second - so it’s less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it," he added. "One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front." "Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors," Pavel Kroupa, Pflamm-Altenburg's colleague at the University of Bonn and lead author, explained in the statement. In fact, their new findings are far more in line with a different theory called "Modified Newtonian Dynamics" (MOND). "In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail." "However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true," Pflamm-Altenburg added. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars."īut some of their recent observations seemingly defy conventional physics. ![]() "According to Newton’s laws of gravity, it’s a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the University of Bonn in Germany, co-author of a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement. Some of these clusters fall under a category astrophysicists call open star clusters, which are created in a relatively short period of time as they ignite in a huge cloud of gas.ĭuring this process, loose stars accumulate in a pair of "tidal tails," one of which is being pulled behind, while the other moves ahead. Massive clusters of stars usually are bound together in spirals at the center of galaxies. Astronomers are puzzled by the strange behavior of certain crooked clusters of stars, which appear to be violating our conventional understanding of gravity.
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