Scientists Spot Thousands of Newborn Stars Fleeing Their Nursery

Yahoo

05-05-2025

As humans do from their parents' homes and birds do from their nests, stars leave their so-called stellar nurseries once they're old enough to do so. Unlike Earthly beings, however, it usually takes hundreds of millions of years for stars to age out of their childhood homes. That's why it's strange that, in the constellation Ophiuchus, more than 1,000 newborn stars are fleeing their home after just 20 million years of existence—and no one can explain why they're doing it.
This bizarre stellar behavior came to light via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia mission, which captured the biggest and most detailed sky map yet before retiring in March 2025. Gaia made history by measuring the position, distance, spectra, and velocity of nearly 2 billion stars. After researchers at Western Washington University and the University of North Florida developed a method that would allow them to scan Gaia's spectroscopic findings for young, low-mass stars, they found Ophiuchus, also known as Ophion. And within Ophion, they found newly formed stars dispersing in "record time."
Gaia's massive troves of stellar data made this discovery possible—and produced this stunning view of the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Rapid pace aside, these stars are strange because they're striking out on their own, not sticking to small family clusters. Of course, gravity (not sentimentality) is responsible for stars' typical group behavior: Conditions that make it easy for one star to form usually lead to several new stars, which remain bound together by gravity for "millions or even billions of years," NASA explains. Throughout that great window of time, the stars slowly separate from one another; some even die within the cluster. But Ophion's newborn stars are scattering frantically in different directions.
"Ophion is filled with stars that are set to rush out across the galaxy in a totally haphazard, uncoordinated way, which is far from what we'd expect for a family so big," computer scientist and lead study author Dylan Huson told the ESA. "What's more, this will happen in a fraction of the time it'd usually take for such a large family to scatter. It's like no other star family we've seen before."
Neither Huson nor his colleagues can definitively say why Ophion's stars are behaving so uniquely, but they have a couple of guesses. Though Ophion is 650 light-years from Earth, it's closer to some other massive clusters of young stars, meaning it's possible that some bizarre energetic interactions between the groups might have triggered the unusual behavior. Supernovae could have also exploded in the region, rushing material past the constellation and forcing the stars to "move far more rapidly and erratically than before," says the ESA.
Though Gaia is no longer operational, its vast troves of star data will make it possible for the team to dig deeper into Ophion's oddities.