Screen Shot 2014-12-07 at 6.19.41 PMGlobular clusters are old compact systems containing up to a about a million of stars. How so many stars form in such a small area still remains unclear.  A particular puzzling feature is that effectively all globular cluster appear to harbor more than one stellar population within them.

In this paper we propose that a first generation of massive stars polluted their lower mass sisters while they were still fully convective PMS stars.  While details still need to be worked out, a very attractive feature of this scenario is that it provides a solution for the long standing mass budget problem.

Early Disc Accretion as the Origin of Abundance Anomalies in Globular Clusters“, by Bastian, Lamers, de Mink, Longmore, Goodwin & Gieles, 2013, MNRAS in press.

Categories:

Comments are closed