JERUSALEM, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- A new study has found that most massive stars in the early universe formed as binary systems, meaning they were born in pairs, similar to the way many massive stars form in the Milky Way, Israel's Tel Aviv University said in a statement on Thursday.
The study, led by Tomer Shenar from Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy, Hugues Sana from KU Leuven University in Belgium, and Julia Bodensteiner from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, was published in Nature Astronomy. It offers the first strong evidence that massive stars in pairs were common in the early universe, and probably even more common than they are today.
This discovery helps scientists better understand how galaxies, black holes, and heavy elements formed, according to the statement.
Massive stars are extremely powerful, as they can be 10 times or more the mass of the Sun and emit more energy than a million Sun-like stars.
They shape the galaxies they live in, produce most of the universe's heavy elements, and end their lives in supernova explosions that leave behind neutron stars or black holes, some of the most mysterious objects in space.
In the Milky Way, the most massive stars are born in binary systems. The stars orbit each other closely, sometimes exchanging material or even merging during their lives. These interactions change how the stars live and die.
The researchers wanted to know if the same was true for massive stars in the early universe. To study this, they utilized the Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe 1,000 massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy with similar chemical conditions to those of the early universe.
By analyzing the light of the stars, the team found that at least 70 percent of the most massive stars are part of close binary systems. ■
