An international team of astronomers led by specialists from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, Spain, has discovered how some of the brightest and hottest stars in the universe - the blue supergiants - are born, writes the magazine "Astrophysical Journal Letters".

B-type blue supergiants are very bright and hot stars.

They are at least 10,000 times brighter and 2-5 times hotter than the Sun, and their masses are 16 to 40 times that of the Sun.

Until recently, it remained a mystery where such objects appear from and why they are found relatively often in space.

Physicists are working on a new theory of gravity

Through simulations of new stellar models and analysis of a large sample of data on the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way, scientists have found evidence that most blue supergiants can form from the merger of two stars bound together in the same system. .

"We modeled the merger of evolved giant stars with their smaller stellar companions in a wide range of parameters, taking into account their interaction during the collision. We found that newborn stars exist as blue supergiants throughout the second phase, i.e. until the depletion of helium in their cores," the researchers wrote.

In the future, the team intends to study how blue supergiants interact with neutron stars and black holes. 

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