Scientists shocked by 1.5 million year age gap between two stars

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The researchers said their findings, published in the journal Science, helps solve two long-standing mysteries: why two stars in this binary star system have a huge age difference, and how massive stars - with a mass that is eight or more times that of the Sun - get their magnetic fields. “The more distant star formed a new orbit with the newly merged, now-magnetic star, creating the binary we see today at the centre of the nebula.” Dr Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile, added: “A nebula surrounding two massive stars is a rarity, and it really made us feel like something cool had to have happened in this system. “After a detailed analysis, we could determine that the more massive star appears much younger than its companion, which doesn’t make any sense since they should have formed at the same time.” A team of international scientists analysed nine years’ worth of data from HD 148937, which is around 3,800 light years away from Earth, located in the direction of the Norma constellation. While astronomers had suspected for some time that massive stars could acquire magnetic fields when two stars merge, this is the first time scientists have found direct evidence of it happening.