Die Young, Stay Hot

No, it's not the lyrics to a bad remake of a Deborah Harry song. It's Friday, and time once again to turn to one of our favorite non-political topics.... astronomy. Astronomers using the infrared and x-ray capabilities of the Chandra X-ray Observatory have identified a ring of very young, extremely massive, "superstars" circling very close around the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

On Earth, this might be a bit like setting up a maternity ward on the side of an active volcano. But researchers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other instruments believe there is a safe zone around black holes, a big dust ring where stars can form.

Apparently there is a price to pay for being a "superstar" like this, though. Much like Kris Kristopherson's character in "A Star is Born", these huge stellar objects won't last for long.

The massive stars buried in the cosmic murk are each between 30 and 50 times the mass of the sun, Nayakshin said.

The more massive the star, the brighter it shines, so that a star with 50 solar masses would be five orders of magnitude brighter than the sun; it would shine with the brilliance of 100,000 suns, Nayakshin said.

Over the course of perhaps 5 million years or so -- a mere blink of an eye in astronomical time -- these high mass stars would likely lose 80 percent of their mass and explode as supernovae, transforming into smaller black holes around the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy.

Unlike the sun, which burns its fuel slowly, these massive stars live fast and die young.

Of course, the first question that popped into my mind was, I wonder if any of them developed any planets? I imagine that it's highly unlikely. Also, even if there was some planetary formation happening in the stars' accretion disks, they will only live for 5 million years. It's estimated that it took nearly 4 billion years for the earth to solidify, cool, and stabilize to the point where life began to evolve, so living around these monsters doesn't look too likely. And there's the issue of the constant wash of hellacious x-rays belting out of the black hole constantly.

But man oh man.. can you imagine the view in the night sky if they did?