Many stars contain elements that require an extreme amount of heat to produce, such as aluminum which would require temperatures of up to 70 million °C.
This is well above the temperature that stars are believed to reach in their core, around the 15–20 million Celsius mark, similar to that of the Sun.
So researchers came up with a possible solution: a massive supermassive star shooting out chemical “pollution.”
They theorize that these massive stars formed from successive collisions in tightly packed globular clusters.
Corinne Charbonnel, an astrophysicist at the University of Geneva and lead author of the study, told AFP that “a type of seed star will swallow up more and more stars”.
It will eventually become “like a giant nuclear reactor that constantly feeds on matter, which will spit out a lot of it,” he said.
This “pollution” would feed on the young forming stars, he said, giving them more chemicals the closer they are to the supermassive star.
But the team still needed observations to support their theory.